Content uploaded by Stephen Childress
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Stephen Childress on Dec 10, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
0
FROM REVOLUTION TO RUIN: A PRELIMINARY LOOK AT RWANDA’S FIRST
TWO PRESIDENTS, GRÉGOIRE KAYIBANDA AND JUVÉNAL
HABYARIMANA, AND THEIR ADMINISTRATIONS
A DISSERTATION IN
English
and
The Social Science Consortium
Presented to the Faculty of the University
of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
by
STEPHEN E. CHILDRESS
M.A., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2000
B.F.A., Herron School of Art, Indiana University, 1969
Kansas City, Missouri
2015
© 2015
STEPHEN E. CHILDRESS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
iii
FROM REVOLUTION TO RUIN: A PRELIMINARY LOOK AT RWANDA’S FIRST
TWO PRESIDENTS, GRÉGOIRE KAYIBANDA AND JUVÉNAL
HABYARIMANA, AND THEIR ADMINISTRATIONS
Stephen E. Childress, Candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree
University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2015
ABSTRACT
This paper brings together primary and secondary materials from a vast number of sources
related to the first two presidents of Rwanda, Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal
Habyarimana, in a preliminary look at the men and their administrations. Using a critical
realist methodology, a rounded picture of the two presidents results, and the following
findings, in particular are presented: the genocide was not an inevitable aspect of
Habyarimana’s policies, and would not have occurred without the RPF invasion; the effect
of literacy on the illiterate Rwandan society, from its introduction at the start of the
twentieth century, had a profound impact on the socio-political and economic system, and
the culture—an impact that has not been adequately recognized per se; the rhizomic nature
of the Rwandan social and cultural matrix carried through even the dramatic shift from a
chiefdom to independence and a constitutional republic; the questionable nature of Rwanda
as a legitimate nation-state under the First and Second Republics; the reason why the
single-party government system was chosen and why it failed both presidencies; and the
iv
impossible demands on the first presidencies to build an entire State infrastructure from the
ground up in the period of a few years.
KEYWORDS: Rwanda, Tutsi, Hutu, the Church, literacy, Kayibanda, Habyarimana, Hutu
Movement and independence, ubuhake, MRND, one-party state, umuganda, animations,
multipartyism, RPF, akazu, Hutu Manifesto, militias, Arusha Accords.
v
APPROVAL PAGE
.
The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, have
examined a dissertation titled “From Revolution To Ruin: A Preliminary Look at
Rwanda’s First Two Presidents, Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana, and Their
Administrations,” presented by Stephen E. Childress, candidate for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance.
Supervisory Committee
Stephen Dilks, Ph.D., Committee Chair
Department of English
Daniel Mahala, Ph.D.
Department of English
James Sturgeon, Ph.D.
Department of Economics
Shannon Jackson, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology
Mathew Forstater, Ph.D.
Department of Economics
vi
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................... iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ................................................................................................ ix
LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................. x
LIST OF MAPS .................................................................................................................... xi
LIST OF ORGANOGRAMS .............................................................................................. xii
PHOTOS ............................................................................................................................. xiii
GLOSSARY ....................................................................................................................... xiv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. xxii
PREFACE .............................................................................................................................. 1
PART ONE
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 10
2. RESEARCH METHOD ...................................................................................... 14
3. DISCLAIMER ..................................................................................................... 18
PART TWO
4. Underpinnings of Rwandan Identity: ‘Tutsi’ and ‘Hutu’ Populations /
Socio-Psychological Effects Of The Hutu-Tutsi ‘Divide’ / Socio-Political
Structure From Habyarimana’s Grandfather’s Time / No Village
Pattern / Northwest Region Semi-Autonomous ............................................... 19
5. Habyarimana’s Grandfather / Father / Habyarimana’s Early Years ................ 42
6. Kayibanda’s Early Years / Léon Classe Institute / Catholic Action and the
Start of the “Hutu Movement / Office of School Inspection”/ Kinyamateka
as Political Platform ......................................................................................... 64
vii
7. The Bahutu Manifesto / Beginnings of PARMEHUTU Party / New
Parties and the 1959 Elections / The Peasant Revolt (The Muyaga) and
the Violence of Toussaint Rwandaise) / Communal Elections ...................... 102
PART THREE
8. Habyarimana: University / Officer’s School .................................................. 172
9. Independence / Kayibanda’s Presidency and the First Republic / The
Constitution Of 1962 / Municipal Elections / The 1963 Inyenzi Attacks /
The One-Party State ....................................................................................... 179
10. Habyarimana and Kayibanda / Kayibanda’s Failure and Decline / The
Coup d’État of 1973 ....................................................................................... 220
PART FOUR A: HABYARIMANA AND THE 2
ND
REPUBLIC; THE FIRST
PERIOD (1973-75)
11. Following the Coup d’État: the CPUN .......................................................... 266
PART FOUR B: HABYARIMANA AND THE 2
nd
REPUBLIC: THE SECOND
PERIOD (1975-90)
12. The MRND Party / Umuganda / Animations/ Jurisprudence ......................... 280
13. Economic Ills and the Growth of an Inegalitarian Society—the Urban-
Rural Dichotomy ............................................................................................ 312
PART FOUR C: HABYARIMANA AND THE 2
nd
REPUBLIC: THE THIRD
PERIOD (1990-94)
14. Challenges to Habyarimana and the One-Party State / The Akazu / Mobutu’s
Influence / La Baule / Aggiornamento / The Structural
Adjustment Program (SAP) ........................................................................... 358
15. Brief Look at the RPF and Why They Invaded / The Hutu Ten
Commandments / The 1991 Constitution / Multipartyism / ID cards ............ 414
16. Youth Militias and the Fomentation of Violence / The Church at the
End of 1991 / Opposition Parties Form Coalition .......................................... 442
17. RPF Violates Cease-Fire Agreement / RTLM / New Coalition
viii
Government .................................................................................................... 473
18. Arusha Accords / Burundian President Assassinated / Habyarimana
Sworn in as President of BBTG / The Failure to Install the Transition
Government / The Dar es Salaam Summit and Habyarimana
Assassinated ................................................................................................... 503
Appendix
A. Kayibanda’s Presidential Address (Excerpt) 1961 ........................................... 550
B. The 1962 Rwandan Constitution ...................................................................... 551
C. Kayibanda’s Address to The Country, 10 April 1964: “Democracy
Is Incompatible With Violence” .................................................................... 552
D. Message to the Nation from the President of the Committee for
Peace and National Unity on the Occasion of the July 1973
Coup d’État ................................................................................................... 554
E. Communiqué Issued at the End of a Regional Summit Meeting in
Dar Es Salaam on 6th April 1994 .................................................................. 556
F. Habyarimana Through the Eyes of His Wife, Agathe Kanziga ....................... 558
G. A Comment on the 1962 Constitution ............................................................. 562
REFERENCE LIST ................................................................................................................. 566
VITA ............................................................................................................................ 595
ix
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure Page
1. Depiction of Necessary Relationships ..................................................................... 14
2. Visual Rendition of the Notion of Habitus .............................................................. 15
3. Outcomes from Relationship Between the State and Traditional Authority ......... 148
4. Codere’s System Analysis of Pre-Independence Rwanda (A)
Compared with the MRND’s One-Party Regime 1974 – 1994 (B) ....................... 297
5. Population Density of Kigali ................................................................................. 337
6. UN Human Development Index ............................................................................ 346
7. Annual Rwanda Gov’t Expenditure to Support Producer Price for Coffee,
1965-1992 .............................................................................................................. 362
8. DRC’s Coltran Trade, c. 2009 ............................................................................... 387
9. Habyarimana Buying Arms (Cartoon) ................................................................... 461
10. Rawson’s Memorandum to State 18 March .......................................................... 536
x
TABLES
Table Page
1. Habyarimana’s Grandparents, Parents, Siblings (as of 2013) ................................. 56
2. Consultative Councils (Instituted under Belgium’s 10-year Plan for Economic
and Social Development, 1950) ............................................................................... 85
3. Examples of 11 Hutu Respondents in Codere’s 1960 Study of Peasant-Farmers ... 87
4. Comparison of First and Second Republic Primary Objectives ............................ 268
5. How the Practice of Umuganda in Rwanda Has Evolved ..................................... 292
6. Informal Workforce in 3 Developing Regions of the World ................................. 330
7. Distribution of Credit by Economic Sector ........................................................... 342
8. Employment in Rwanda by Principle Economy 1985 ........................................... 343
9. GNP per Capita Rwanda vs. Neighboring Countries ............................................ 347
10. Trends in Aid to Rwanda 1988/90 to 1991/1993 ................................................... 402
11. Support for the Structural Adjustment Program in Rwanda .................................. 404
12. 1991 Institution Directors by Region of Origin ..................................................... 434
13. Biggest RTLM Shareholders ................................................................................. 490
14. Government of 18 July 1993 ................................................................................. 502
xi
MAPS
Map Page
1. Distribution of Sites with Early Domestic Cattle .................................................... 23
2. Habyarimana’s Ancestral Region ............................................................................ 38
3. Habyarimana’s Primary and Secondary Schools, and Catholic Missions,
c. 1937-57 ............................................................................................................... 60
4. Kayibanda’s Home Area .......................................................................................... 66
5. Prefectures During Habyarimana’s Presidency ..................................................... 278
6. Francophone Africa 1990 ...................................................................................... 394
7. Gisenyi and Ruhengeri Massacres ......................................................................... 458
xii
ORGANOGRAMS
Organogram Page
1. Belgium Government Structure in Colonial Rwanda .............................................. 44
2. Precolonial Socio-Administrative Structure ............................................................ 77
3. Regional to Local Level Government Hierarchy 1974 .......................................... 272
4. Habyarimana’s Government Structure 1973-78 .................................................... 277
5. MRND Governing Structure 1973-78 ................................................................... 281
6. Three Organograms Showing Major Changes in Rwanda’s Socio-Political
Structure, 1900-1985 ............................................................................................. 374
xiii
PHOTOS
Photo Page
1. Kayibanda ......................................................................................................... 260-61
2. Habyarimana ..................................................................................................... 262-64
3. Interahamwe and RPF/Kagame ............................................................................. 265
4. Successive Rwandan Presidents Promoting Umuganda ........................................ 293
xiv
GLOSSARY
APROSOMA L’Association Pour le Promotion des Masses Bahutu – created
around 1957 by Joseph Gitera, one of the signatories of the
Bahutu Manifesto, was a stridently anti-Tutsi party, to the left
of Kayibanda’s MSM party.
animations Compulsory participation in large-scale shows of allegiance to
Habyarimana and the MRND/State, through dance, song, skits,
and poetry/oratory. Conceived as ‘support’ for the unpopular
umuganda.
aggiornamento A spirit of open-mindedness and change, usually
modernization; Habyarimana’s 1989 declaration concerning
his acceptance of multipartyism.
akazu An informal and relatively fluid group of power brokers in and
around the government that was made up primarily of people
from the north, who were considered to pull the strings of
political appointments and to influence policy, and to control
the most valuable parastatals and other business opportunities.
Also associated with the Hutu Power movement and
philosophy—which was against the democratization of the
government via the Arusha Accords, and which drove the
perpetrators of the genocide.
Amasasu Created early in 1992 within the Rwandan army by diehard
officers zealously wanting to hunt down the RPF; they handed
out weapons to the CDR militias and MRND extremists, and
assisted the newly-formed death squads (zero network).
BBTG Broad-Based Transitional Government – pushed forward at
Gbadolite September 1991, by the RPF and the coalition of
opposition parties, amended at Arusha July 1992, and finalized
in the Arusha Accords of 1993; to end the single-party
government of Habyarimana’s MRND and to institute
democratic reforms, especially multipartyism and power
sharing.
CDR Party Coalition pour la Défense de la République -- started in March
1992 by Jean Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze (who
published the notorious Ten Commandments of the Bahutu);
the CDR, the military, and extremist elements of the MRND
threatened to make fierce reprisals against Habyarimana if he
xv
allowed certain concessions to the RPF during his negotiations
to end the war, the CDR, particularly, being vehemently
opposed to the BBTG.
cellule The largest unit within the secteur, with about 1,000 persons,
headed by a responsible and an elected committee of five
people.
Chajusong North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s idea that the popular
masses must rise up and “remodel their destiny independently
and creatively”, meaning, as in North Korea’s case, that the
country had been overlain with ‘foreign’ structures and ideas,
and new, indigenous ones were necessary. This philosophy
dovetails in essence with the Afro-centric idea of the ‘60s and
‘70s, that countries needed to slough off their colonial
trappings and get back to their African roots.
colline The smallest unit in the government system, comprised of a
group of families connected by close proximity on a colline
(hill), and controlled by centrally-appointed administrators,
chiefs, security agents, policemen, and local party cadres of all
kinds.
commune The largest unit within the préfecture. There were 145, each
having 40,000 to 50,000 residents, and overseen by a
burgomaster.
CNS Commission Nationale de Synthèse – set up after the
aggiornamento, its function was to determine what
‘democracy’ meant in the eyes of the populace at large and
then to prepare an outline for a new constitution.
CPUN Committee for Peace and National Unity – a temporary
government composed entirely of military personnel, set up
after the 1973 coup d’état.
évolués The Hutu intelligentsia, during the Belgian colonial period,
who would become the spearhead of the anti-mwami
(monarchy), independence movement.
FAR Rwandan Armed Forces.
Hamitic hypothesis John Hanning Speke’s 1863 hypothesis that everything of
value found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites,
allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race, and that the Tutsi
xvi
were representative of that branch coming from the general
area of Ethiopia, as opposed to the Hutu, who were indigenous
to ‘black’ Africa, and therefore inferior.
Hutu Traditionally, and up to the 1990s, the majority peasant-farmer
population of Rwanda, who lived in a particular socio-political
and cultural habitus. They generally occupied the position of
client in the cattle leasing arrangement (though this
arrangement was not ubiquitous among Hutu, and many Tutsi
were also clients of other Tutsi) until that system’s end after
independence.
Hutu Manifesto The declaration written by the leaders of the Hutu Movement
at the end of the 1950s that demanded the dissolution of the
mwami system (also called the ‘monarchy’) because of its
disenfranchisement of the Hutu, and the end of the Belgium
administration’s support of the monarchy. It was part of the
movement toward a republican form of government, and one
of its drafters was Grégoire Kayibanda, the first elected
president of independent Rwanda.
Hutu Ten Commandments Racist declaration of Hutu Power ideology, published in
Kangura, December 1990.
IDPs Internally displaced persons – citizens driven from their homes
by dire circumstances, and made refugees.
igikingi Land held by a cattle-owning lineage, granted by the king or
another political official. (immigrants to the region who
received land from lineages holding ubukonde land would
become land clients –abagereerwa—and they would be
expected o contribute certain food products to the donor
lineage as a form of rent.
Interahamwe Youth militia initially seen as a kind of loyalist activist group
in the service of the MRND ideology, with a plan to use it in
an urban civil war.
1
Initially used for recruiting, and for
harassing opposition parties’ functions, but they became more
aligned with the extremist CDR party and Hutu Power
followers, growing more violent at the end of 1993 and the
beginning of ’94, with killings and destruction of property.
Were used by the perpetrators of the genocide to man
roadblocks and to kill.
1
See: Audition du professeur Prunier, CER , Sénat de Belgique, 11 juin 1997, pp. 18/7 à 18/10.
xvii
Inyenzi Groups of Tutsi exiles coming from among those who fled the
violence surrounding the move to independence, and who
launched attacks on Rwanda in an effort to regain power.
Juche The means by which Chajusong moves forward: through the
decisive role the masses play in building the new society.
Kangura A bi-monthly based in Gisenyi (Habyarimana’s stronghold) set
up to counter the negative press against the administration, and
which eventually became mouthpiece for Hutu Power.
Kinyamateka Catholic Church’s news publication in Rwanda, founded in
1933 and written in Kinyarwanda, was meant to be read out
loud to assembled illiterate peasant-farmers, and became the
major organ through which Kayibanda disseminated his ideas
in the ‘50s, but which, by the ‘80s, was becoming outspoken
against Habyarimana’s administration’s failures and use of
violence.
Kinyarwanda Native language of Rwandans.
kubohoza Intimidation of party members in order to force them to join
another party.
La Baule Franco-African summit in 1990, at which Mitterrand set down
France’s new politico-economic policy eliminating its
subsidized African franc in the francophone African countries,
and requiring stepped-up and visible progress towards
democratic government as a condition for aid.
L’Ami Catholic periodical in French, founded in 1945 to offer a
“Christian perspective on the complex questions of Rwandan
social and political life”, was pro-Belgian and anti-communist,
and aimed at the Rwandan elite.
MDR Party Mouvement Démocratique Républicain – formed from 18 June
1991, presented themselves as reformers, at core genuinely
seeking to address the problems of state. Historical links with
Kayibanda’s MDR-Parmehutu, so its power-base and
geographical center was Kayibanda’s—the south-central area.
MRND Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour le Développement – the
national party that Habyarimana created in 1975 for a one-
party State.
xviii
MSM Forerunner of the PARMEHUTU Party.
mugaragu The client in a cattle leasing arrangement.
mwami Ruler (roughly translatable as ‘king’, but not in the European
traditional or historical sense), having a ‘court’, or council
(batware) and vertical socio-political system of chiefs and
subchiefs.
OAU Organization of African Unity.
OCIR-CAFÉ Office de Cafes – government organization controlling the
coffee industry.
Operation Noroît French troops sent to support Habyarimana’s FAR troops repel
the RPF invasion.
PARMEHUTU Parti du Mouvement de l’Émancipation Hutu – was
Kayibanda’s Hutu Movement organ, leading to independence
and a republican government. In 1960 they added MDR
(Mouvement Démocratique Républicain) to their party name,
and this MDR title (by itself) was resurrected, when
Habyarimana’s allowed multiparty politics toward the end of
his presidency, to represent as a party the disenfranchised
south-central part of the country, and became the main
contender against Habyarimana’s MRND. PDC Party Created
by Jean-Népomuscène Nayinzira, wanted to create dissent
within the Catholic community but, because it was in
opposition to Habyarimana it was not recognized by the
Internationale Démocrate Chrétienne, and had difficulty
attracting many followers
PL Party A center-right, urban-based party, led by Justin Mugenzi and
the Tutsi, Landouald Ndasingwa, which had the support of the
private sector and hence the Tutsi group. “had been created
under the instigation of President Juvénal Habyarimana by a
group of businessmen; this party had for its mission to collect
economic experts who could recommend a capital-intensive
management of the country.
préfecture The largest administrative unit within the country, presided
over by a prefect (similar to a governor). There were 10 in
Habyarimana’s government (see Map 5).
xix
PSD Party A center-left party, led by Frédéric Nzamurambaho, and
attracting teachers, public service employees, and the liberal
professions; drew its support from the area south of the MDR
influence, around the university town of Butare, the country’s
second largest city and center for intellectuals, and where the
largest community of Tutsis lived.
RADER Rassemblement Démocratique du Rwanda – formed just after
UNAR, was a mainly Tutsi, but multi-ethnic pro-Belgian
party, representing accomplished administrator’s families, and
liberal Tutsi thinkers who were against racial extremists.
RANU Rwanda Alliance for National Unity – first called the Rwanda
Refugee Welfare Foundation, it was a Tutsi refugee
organization operating from Uganda and Kenya, suing for
repatriation. Frustrated with inaction, they renamed themselves
the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), as a politico-military
entity bent on invading Rwanda.
rentier class Agents collecting unearned income.
RPF Tutsi-based organization coalesced around the goal to
repatriate all Tutsi refugees back into the country and to install
a democratic government. See: RANU.
RTLM Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – started as
propaganda tool to counter the RPF’s broadcasting station, and
in response to the opposition parties’ insistence that the
government radio station, Radio Rwanda, take a different
stance.
Rwabugiri Late nineteenth century mwami who centralized rule of
Rwandan territory (c. 1860-1895).
SAP Structural Adjustment Program – an ‘adjustment’ package
imposed on underdeveloped countries by the World Bank and
the IMF that attempts to address under-achieving
economic/political systems.
secteur The largest unit within the commune, each having
approximately 5,000 people.
shebuja The patron in a cattle leasing arrangement.
xx
SORWATHE Société Rwandaise pour la Production et la Commercialisation
du Thé – government organization controlling the tea industry.
Thermidorian syndrome A reaction against the upheaval of change, as experienced in a
revolution.
TRAFIPRO Travail, Fidélité, Progrès – was a cooperative begun in 1956 as
a feeder for Burgeoning Hutu businessmen and politicians.
Eventually taken over by Kayibanda and his associates in a
regionalist move.
Tutsi A confusing and somewhat fluent term from at least the
seventeenth century, that became rigid under mwami
Rwabugiri’s rule to mean the small number of elite who were
most often the patron in the ubuhake contract, and who existed
in a particular socio-political cultural milieu (or habitus)
disdainful of the ‘working’ class peasant-farmers, and usually
made up the warrior class and the vast majority of chief and
subchief positions.
Twa A pygmoid people, making up a miniscule percent of the
population, and who occupied a fringe position in society (will
not be considered in this. paper as an influential part of the
large socio-political movements).
ubuhake Cattle leasing arrangement.
ubukonde Land which had been cleared and settled by the lineage
occupying it or their ancestors (i.e., land which had not been
received from a political authority, and which and been
occupied for many years by the same lineage). In the north,
Hutu-owned lands often leased out for usufruct.
uburetwa A corvée dating from precolonial times, hated because of
denoting low status and consisting of menial labor, imposed
almost exclusively on Hutu land-holders, which was later
generalized by the Belgians into a tax consisting of one day of
labor per week.
Ujamaa Swahili word for ‘socialism’, and was Tanzanian president
Nyerere’s villagization program from 1967 focusing on self-
sufficiency, but failed miserably by 1985.
xxi
umuganda A camouflaged corvée instituted by Habyarimana in 1974; it is
a compulsory form of community service that was traditionally
and originally an organic community-developed system of
mutual aid.
UNAMIR United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (October
1993-March 1996) – peace keeping mission for the period
when the BBTG was supposed to be initiated.
UNAR Union Nationale Rwandaise – was the Tutsi response to
APROSOMA.
Zero Network An organization of death squads by extremist elements in the
MRND and the akazu, in response to the RPF invasion, and
who wanted to derail the BBTG
xxii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, and above all else, this thesis wouldn’t have been possible without the
unstinting support of my wife, Angha Sirpurkar, a respected professional in
her own right.
Second, I must give a handshake to Dr. Steve Dilks, who took on the work of
committee chair, made sure I got through the doctoral process, and is
genuinely dedicated to education. Also, thank you to Dr. Daniel Mahala, Dr.
James Sturgeon, Dr. Mathew Forstater, and Dr. Shannon Jackson, for agreeing
to be on my committee, and for considering my work worthy; and a special
recognition to Dr. Sturgeon for getting the interdisciplinary program off the
ground and making the Social Science Consortium an invaluable addition to
cross-fertilization scholarship, and for giving me the chance to design and
teach a new course on genocide. Additionally, my gratitude goes to Dr.
Randall Roorda, whose belief in an autodidact made possible my entrance into
the doctoral program. Drs. Mamadou Niang and Moira Ferguson were also
important in their early support. And a posthumous thank you to Dr. Carol
Koehler, a member of my committee who passed away before I completed my
Ph.D.
Finally, I want to thank the Graduate Studies Department at UMKC for
having helped me fund my research through several fellowships and awards.
A very special thank you to Connie Mahone, Manager of Student Services for
many years, for working her incomparable magic in order to get me through
the often seemingly impossible red tape of course requirements, grade
changes, and everything else that at times created large headaches. Her
retirement from UMKC will leave a significant gap.
1
PREFACE
A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also
change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the
previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are
arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an
inner architecture.
— Italo Calvino
1
History is one of the most prevalent disciplines between nations and races.
Common people want to know it. Kings, Leaders seek it emulously ... It
offers ground for meditation, for an effort to find an access to truth, for a
subtle explanation of the causes and the origins of the facts ... Thus, history
finds its roots in philosophy.
— Ibn Khaldun
2
This preliminary study of Rwanda’s first two presidents germinated in the
immediate aftermath of the 1994 genocide, which galvanized me to do research on the
mechanisms underlying the path to genocidal events. When I began reading what was
accessible regarding the Rwandan massacres, that reading quickly turned into months and
then years, and I was struck by a particular gap in the literature: little was being said about
the leader of the country, Juvénal Habyarimana. It was at this juncture that I began
considering looking into Habyarimana’s role in the country’s development during his
presidency.
Then, in 2004—ten years after the genocide—the first
3
written treatment of
Habyarimana appeared: Eugène Shimamungu’s Juvénal Habyarimana; L’Homme
1
Calvino, 1986: 124.
2
Ibn Khaldun, 1967: vol. 1: 5.
3
There was Barahinyura’s Le Général-Major Habyarimana, Quinze Ans de Tyrannie et de Tartuferie au Rwanda, of
1988, but it treated a very narrow period in Habyarimana’s life, starting with his coup d’état to power in 1973. It was
not a biographical essay, but a vituperative attack on the president essentially centered on his regime’s murder of
2
Assassiné 6 Avril 1994. It wasn’t a full-throated biography so much as an unalloyed paean
by a Hutu expatriate to the Hutu leader, a subjective text in the service of countering the
role of the current Tutsi president in office, Paul Kagame, who had led the Rwandan
Patriotic Front in its successful military invasion in 1990, then its takeover of the country
in 1994. A more balanced and nuanced examination of Habyarimana, especially as he
existed as a Rwandan in the socio-political, economic, and cultural milieu of the country,
was needed, especially with a consideration of the historical context of his personal
development and presidency. Even as I complete this preliminary investigation of
Habyarimana, in 2015, there hasn’t been another focused treatment of him.
1
Similarly, but to an even greater degree, Kayibanda’s life has received little
attention outside of Paternostre de la Mairieu’s 1994 biographic tome of admiration, Toute
ma vie pour vous, mes frères! Vie de Grégoire Kayibanda, premier Président élu du
Rwanda, which does contain much factual information about the First Republic president
as it follows him from his childhood to his murder, and is a valuable source regarding his
private journals, but it fails to examine the president’s weaknesses and failures, especially
those that led to his administration’s failure and his deposition in the 1973 coup.
In the above two regards, my dissertation begins to address an important gap about
these two leaders and their roles in creation and development of a new African country. It
also has the purpose of engaging a dialogue about them; all of the primary and most of the
secondary texts carrying information about Habyarimana and Kayibanda are in
President Kayibanda and Kayibanda’s high-level office holders, as well as the imprisonment and murder, on other
occasions, of some innocent civilians. Little is to be learned from it about Habyarimana or his presidency.
1
Verwimp, a respected researcher, makes what I consider to be dubious assumptions about Habyarimana’s
presidency and policies in his “Peasant ideology and genocide in Rwanda under Habyarimana” (2000), and gives
little idea of the man and his life (which, admittedly, is not his aim).
3
Kinyarwanda and French, and for the wide audience that doesn’t read either of those
languages, this treatment in English is intended to help make access to information about
Habyarimana and Kayibanda more easily available.
A dialogue about Habyarimana is sorely needed not only because so little, up to
this point, has been written, but because the scattered fragments that have been written are
inevitably paired with the genocide or with the shadow group called the akazu, which
presumably consisted primarily of members of Habyarimana’s wife’s relatives.
Habyarimana’s supposed role in or relationship with this ill-defined group is largely
undocumented, and obscures the man and his life. This paper, by prying Habyarimana
loose from hearsay, over the full course of his life, allows a comparatively new, or at least
more neutral, portrait to be constructed across various social levels and time frames, with
all the contradictions that pertain.
An enlarged dialogue about Kayibanda is also necessary as an elaboration within
the stream of Rwandan history, especially as he and his Hutu Movement were instrumental
in and responsible for the momentous shift from the milieu of colonial socio-political and
cultural disruption and change to independence and a new State. This paper hopes to at
least place Kayibanda and Habyarimana next to each other for the first time in the flow of
Rwandan history in a way that will represent a holistic, rather than a bifurcated, or
compartmentalized, picture of the country’s development.
The two consecutive presidents represent a particularly unique struggle to break
free—not from a repressive colonialism, as most other sub-Saharan countries did—from
the precolonial mwami system. This is not to suggest that the Belgian administration of the
4
country didn’t have an impact—it and the Roman Catholic Church were the two prime and
indispensible catalysts for Kayibanda’s and the évolués’ emergence—but the small number
of power holders from the minority ethnic Tutsi population had controlled the country
from at least the seventeenth century, and their inequitable patron-client system had
become onerous by the beginning of the twentieth century; it was this system that
Kayibanda and his educated associates successfully labored to overthrow and, once
overthrown, to prevent from recurring, which morphed into an underlying paranoiac
watchdog mentality running through both presidents’ reigns. Still, it isn’t clear to what
degree Habyarimana considered the in-country Tutsi a threat to his administration, as
compared to the many Hutu power factions, office seekers, and military officers, whom he
had to appease in order to stay in power and to keep his person safe.
This paper also raises the consideration of the deep effect that the introduction of
literacy had on Rwandan society and on the two presidencies, which has been largely
overlooked or not given its due. It was a requisite tool in the consciousness raising among
the Hutu majority population by Kayibanda’s Hutu Movement, that led to voting out the
Tutsi monarchy, and in the 1980s fueled and gave voice to people’s discontent with
Habyarimana’s one-party state system. I have tried to give an indication of the changes
accruing from the populace being able to read and write, especially in the development, for
the first time, of a Hutu intellectual class.
This paper, also for the first time, asks whether Rwanda should be considered a
legitimate nation-state, from independence through Habyarimana’s reign, because it did
not have the requisite infrastructure, and because it simply couldn’t exist without
5
substantial external support. The two presidents’ struggles with the massive, and in many
cases intractable, problems of the sudden leap into the expectancies of statehood are
another aspect of Rwandan history that hasn’t been adequately addressed, or given the
weight it deserves.
The question of why a one-party state was chosen by both presidents is also
addressed, with a new look at the possibility that Habyarimana, for example, was possibly
influenced by his old friend Nsekalije’s admiration of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung’s Juche
ideology and policies. The unworkability of the one-party state, in the case of Rwanda, is
also approached, resulting in some realization of how unprepared both Kayibanda and
Habyarimana were for being presidents, both finding themselves out of their depth and
being case-book examples of the Peter Principle, where their performance before being
president—in the case of Kayibanda, being a great organizer for a movement against an
unequal system, and for Habyarimana, being an effective military commander of a small,
underequipped army—was not adequate for promotion to the higher, different, much more
demanding and complex role (especially concerning the increasingly grave problems of
overpopulation and the need for economic solutions beyond subsistence agriculture).
Part of the reason for their failures as presidents, and presented in this paper, comes
from yet another consideration that has been largely overlooked in the literature on
Rwanda—the rhizomic
1
nature of Rwandan’s socio-political, economic and cultural
dynamic as it moves “underground-like” through events, such as independence and the
1
I first came upon the “rhizomic” concept in Bayart (2009).
6
attempted formation of a democratic republic, and impinges on and entangles those events
in its own irrepressible ways.
The subject of this dissertation was chosen for several reasons, foremost because it
was the agency of the two presidents that largely created the First and Second Republics—
the history of the country would have been completely different without Kayibanda and
Habyarimana at the helm, so it is logical that they figure prominently and as a through line
that helps connect events. I also felt it was necessary to try to approach the ‘Rwandan’
character of the country’s history through the personages of the two central figures—how
they affected and were affected by the socio-political and cultural environment.
This paper’s president-centered, historical-linear form is also geared to reaching as
wide a readership as possible without losing scientific methodology and a veracity that is
subject to peer review; it is factual without being quantitatively over-laden, offering
enough empirical data to form the basis for well-formed hypotheses about the way agency
at different social levels emerges. It must be kept in mind that I haven’t had at my disposal
the wealth of primary and secondary texts that, for example, the famous Africanist Basil
Davidson had for his work on Nkrumah, yet even that fine study didn’t analyze Nkrumah’s
failure to develop his country. As well, this dissertation does not purport to be an
Africanist’s work, but is the attempt by an eclectic and interdisciplinary researcher to begin
to understand something about the first two presidents of a fledgling country, while
incorporating and condensing a great deal of disparate and thin information in presenting
that understanding. In that sense, it is not a biography, per se, but a focus on the two most
7
important individuals in the fifty-year history of Rwanda—from the late 1940s until the
Arusha Accords—in order to try to determine their impact on events and vice versa.
It is also an attempt to show the continuity and contiguity between their two
administrations, not in the fullest possible terms, because there isn’t enough space and time
available for such a treatment in this paper, but in a fashion that allows the reader a
condensed picture of Rwandan socio-political history over the country’s most disrupting
period caused by a majority segment of the population and its leaders, who for several
hundred years held no significant power.
There are, in fact, several ideas for papers embedded in this dissertation, which
time has not allowed to follow up: 1) The massive effect of the sudden introduction of
schools and of literacy on a previously illiterate society, reaching into every corner of
people’s lives: for example, the move toward gender equality, girls suddenly being on a
relatively equal footing in the classroom, and eventually becoming members of the public
administration; the profound psychological shift of large segments of the population, who
had been long relegated to the unequal and often onerously-low status in the client-patron
system, to a feeling of deserving heretofore unrealizable opportunities and basic respect,
including serving in the military, owning one’s land, being able to vote, getting an
education, and being employed in public and private sector jobs; 2) The absolute necessity
of a working legal system in the development and sustenance of a State entity, both in the
socio-political and economic spheres; 3) The question of whether Rwanda constituted a
viable State from its inception to the genocide, since it hadn’t been able to develop an
entrepreneurial class or a viable infrastructure, and couldn’t survive without substantial
8
foreign aid, because its rentier class served little more function than to live off peasant-
farmer labor. The case could be made that the country’s administration had moved little
beyond the chieftainship/mwamiship system it supposedly replaced and so vilified; 4) The
place of a one-party state in a country like Rwanda, with its unique topography that
prevented the natural development of villages and towns, and the roads and markets to
connect them, along with the resultant political structure to manage them, and its relation
to the fact that almost no other new sub-Saharan African State chose a democratic system;
5) The rhizomic elements in Rwandan society that ran through the independence
movement and the two presidencies, causing certain structures and agency that entangled
both Kayibanda and Habyarimana (and, later, President Kagame, as well, in spite of his
destruction of some of its elements); and 6) The terribly difficult problem of bringing an
ancient subsistence-agricultural country—with a thoroughly hilly terrain on which
mechanized farming methods cannot be used, or large land holdings constructed—into a
twentieth-century international economic community in a ridiculously short period of time:
compared to the thousands of years it took Europe to reach its present economic systems
and capabilities, new African countries are faced with, and have been expected to, become
modern States in the space of a few decades. The problems Kayibanda and Habyarimana
encountered cannot be overstated, yet the criticisms of their reigns are couched more in
Eurocentric considerations than in the overwhelming “Rwandan” problems they had to
grapple with; one could almost say that it is remarkable that the Rwandan State survived at
all.
9
Such are the major points touched on in this paper. And it differs in much of the
literature on African presidents, and on Rwandan socio-politics, in its attempted neutral
presentation of the two presidents and their agency; I have tried to keep the hermeneutic
theorizing to a minimum. There will be some disgruntled specialists who will argue that I
haven’t presented enough new evidence about Kayibanda or Habyarimana, but I would
reiterate that the purpose of this paper is to bring together all the information I could glean
from the myriad texts available (that I had access to), and to consolidate that disparate and
unconnected (and often misleading) information into a factual account and preliminary
examination of the two most important persons in recent Rwandan history, in a timeline
that would serve to give a readable sense of that history and add to the knowledge of the
country, as well as provoke a dialogue about it that escapes, to some extent, the
overbearing concept of a genocidal society and country that has come to dominate. I would
hope that this work will be of some use to textbook writers (such as Collins, in works like
his History of sub-Saharan Africa) and course designers, as an accessible reference to a
certain period of African history.
10
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In this preliminary look at the first and second presidents of Rwanda my intent is
to lay the groundwork for a wider investigation into the underlying elements that formed
the Rwandan state in 1962, and the socio-political and economic structures and ideologies
that created and governed the following 32 years that ended in genocide and the
dissolution of the Hutu Republic. It is not an attempt to elaborate an idea of a linear series
of events leading to the 1994 genocide; rather, it is an enquiry into the underlying
structures and agents—with a focus on the two presidents as primary agents—responsible
for significantly influencing the nascent state’s development. Kayibanda and Habyarimana
had the unique opportunity to steer a budding country along various socio-political paths
(as did many African rulers in the 1960s), and the choices that they made are the primary
interest this study.
The two presidents’ lives were both truncated by their being murdered—Kayibanda
died at 52, and Habyarimana at 57, Kayibanda in power for eleven years, and Habyarimana
for twenty years. For nearly a third of a century their governments were marked by bouts
of political violence, a severe over-population problem (in a land-locked diminutive
country predominantly made-up of hills that largely prohibited mechanized farming or the
use of animals for tillage), a primitive infrastructure inherited from a chieftainship system
that was wholly inadequate for providing basic state services such as health care, a viable
11
legal system, and education beyond the primary level, or for establishing a national
economy. Additionally debilitating was the thoroughly corrupt inherited administration
and the demands by former power holders for rents, exacerbated by their constant
jockeying for office, which included trying to destabilize or destroy those in their way.
The problems facing the installation and performance of a first-time presidency and a
‘democratic’ republic were staggering and, one could easily argue, insurmountable.
Kayibanda failed, and his legacy to Habyarimana was not a particularly enlightened or
helpful one: a one-party state, little improved over a chieftaincy, a large foreign debt
without the national or economic improvements to show for it, and a fractured national
party based on regional bias.
Habyarimana, a professional military man (as were many African leaders, the army
being more efficient and disciplined than other state entities), took over the reins of a one-
party state and ruled relatively benignly for most of his tenure. He was finally undone by
his inability to address the serious demands for repatriation by the Tutsi diaspora, and by
the growth of a literate citizenry who, through their representatives, were voicing
unavoidable socio-political demands, pressing for multi-party politics, a more transparent
administration, and for the amelioration of a long list of grievances and human rights
issues. Habyarimana waffled on these demands, as he did on the Tutsi refugee problem,
and it was his inability to act in a timely and effective manner that prompted the October
invasion from Uganda by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), and led to the loss
of control of his MRND party radicals because of his knuckling under to the RPF’s
excessive and unwarranted demands at the Arusha Peace Conference, which provoked
12
militant factions supported by the military into initiating nation-wide massacres of all
Tutsis in a slash-and-burn operation designed to eliminate an entire population and thus
‘defeat’ the enemy by leaving them with an empty country as the spoils of their victory.
However, the genocidal event is not a subject for this paper.
This paper is concerned with the trajectory of Kayibanda’s and Habyarimana’s
lives, but does not carry a preconceived notion of their possible connection to the
genocide. In fact, when examining the arc of their governance, relationships, and
speeches, there are no indications that either held a genocidal perspective. Habyarimana’s
death before the genocidal actions leaves him in an historical limbo. It cannot be proven
that he was involved in any kind of genocidal plan, even though he was aware of a death
list drawn up against top-level individuals—Hutu as well as Tutsi—who were regarded as
‘threats’ to national security, for political reasons more than for being actual menaces.
This study is an attempt to create a preliminary history of the lives of two African
men who came from very humble beginnings as farm boys, to reach the most powerful
post in the country. There is the frustration, however, of having to make up front the
disclaimer that at the present time it is impossible to retrieve enough information about
Habyarimana as needed to give an adequate picture of the man. When his government fled
from the RPF they destroyed or took with them volumes of invaluable documents.
Moreover, Habyarimana has scarcely been mentioned in the literature on Rwanda. He
exists as a shadow figure in the voluminous writings on the genocide and on Rwandan
country studies, a disproportionate number of which are concerned with economics, the
Roman Catholic Church, or issues of ethnic conflict, with others focused on the nascent
13
government’s postcolonial development and its impact on the traditional socio-political
structure. Secondary texts offer little from which to paint even a cursory picture of
Habyarimana’s character, of the psychological and philosophical factors underlying his
presidency.
Also, the majority of people who knew Habyarimana have died—from natural
causes, or have been killed, while many others have proven (at this time) inaccessible for
interviews due to being held without access in prisons in Mali and Benin, or have gone into
hiding to avoid prosecution or assassination. And, besides the fact that Habyarimana can’t
be interviewed, and that very few (and superficial) interviews of the president were
conducted, he left nothing in writing concerning his thoughts on government, politics,
economics, society, or his meetings with other heads of state. Lastly, this being a doctoral
dissertation, time and money were extremely limited. Taken together, these several
‘roadblocks’ have forced this paper to be an initial ‘probe’ into Habyarimana’s life, with a
fuller treatment to follow as more interviews, texts, funds, and time become available.
14
CHAPTER 2
RESEARCH METHOD
The research methodology for this paper has been guided by a critical realist
philosophy (as outlined in my paper cited below
1
, and as is illustrated in Figure 1), in an
1
Childress, online at: http://studo.umkc.edu/idsc/JIDR/JIDR%202008/JIDR2008_Final_Childress.pdf.
Figure 1: Depiction of Necessary Relationships
After Ardebili
15
effort to elucidate the various and many levels of social agency and their emergent
properties, within and outside Rwanda, that were contingent to Habyarimana’s life.
This multi-leveled and eclectic approach can also be fruitfully connected with Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus
1
(see Figure 2), in as much as the subject operates among a particular
collection of unconscious, learned, and shared nodes of beliefs (taken as self-evident
universals) and agency with others, which form a social framework of interconnectedness
of agency and identity (the field), as part of the greater social world.
1
Habitus is an agent’s taking on a position in a “field” (i.e., acquired organization of perception, thought and action)
developed in response to encountered objective social conditions. Social structures are thus instilled correspondingly
into the subjective, mental experience of the agent. Habitus can be likened to socialization—however, it does not only
work at the level of conscious modes of discourse, but is deeper, more pragmatic and pre-reflexive. My minimal
understanding of habitus is not intended to reflect Bourdieu’s exceedingly complex and dense concept. For more on
his notion of habitus see Bourdieu (1976, 1984).
Figure 2: A Visual Rendition of the Notion of Habitus
16
Habitus contributes to the reproduction of society by regulating and generating social
practices. It is class oriented, and in Habyarimana’s case this is particularly revealing,
because he reached the pinnacle of power not as an évolué (an educated elite), but through
the military, a profession and position not commonly associated with the upper class in the
West, but often consisting of the richest and most powerful figures in much of Africa south
of the Sahara, and in non-developed countries around the world which are dominated by
military regimes, directly or indirectly.
The habitus of which Habyarimana was a part necessarily included and was
inseparable from the military, the Church, and a network of entrepreneurs and powerful
men engaged in various levels of monetary transactions, involving legitimate business
deals, as well as the ubiquitous world of graft and corruption. The conditions of this social
life ‘capture’ the participants in the sense that they reproduce these conditions rather than
others. It is this subjective ‘field’ of the habitus that both regulates and is regulated by
Kayibanda and Habyarimana and the other social agents of the habitus in which they
operated. Figure 1 gives a picture of a necessary set of relationships according to a critical
realist perspective as applied in a rigorous examination of society, which can be used to
help recognize the forms and operations of various types of habitus, and which are used in
this paper to examine and attempt to elucidate, to a necessarily limited degree, the
particular habitus each of which Kayibanda and Habyarimana were a part, amidst the
larger social context.
Additionally, the idea of social evolution toward complexity, especially as driven
by technology, of which literacy is a major part, has been enormously helpful in regarding
17
the larger picture of Rwandan change, from the beginning of the twentieth century through
Habyarimana’s government. Literacy acquisition had a profound effect on Rwandan
society in a surprisingly short period of time: from the White Fathers’ mission schools’
proliferation in the early 1920s, public awareness engendered by the ability to read was
responsible for the successful independence movement in 1959, and just 30 year later the
push for multi-party politics. The importance of technology, and the indispensability of
literacy (in all of its communicative forms), is brought home in the statement by Ken
Baynes that the Industrial Revolution depended on the ability to make images on paper
1
.
The other significant technology responsible for change was a cash economy,
introduced in the 1920-30 period by the Belgians under the authority of their trusteeship of
the country. The impact of money on a barter culture was transformative, as well as
disruptive, and in conjunction with the 1962 government’s privatization of land, and
demographic pressure, led to an abusive system of land purchasing by wealthy non-
farmers.
1
Ken Baynes, concerned with the key role played by engineering drawing, in a conversation with Nicholas Basbanes
in Basbanes’ book, On Paper (2013: 287).
18
CHAPTER 3
DISCLAIMER
Because the 1994 genocide overshadows everything concerning Rwanda, it is
necessary to address this “blanketing” with a disclaimer of sorts. This examination of
Kayibanda’s and Habyarimana’s lives was not carried out with the intent of proving
innocence or guilt related to the 1994 genocide, but with trying to understand how a
nascent East African state and its government were initiated and managed over a 32-year
span, until dissolving amid the RPF invasion and ending with Habyarimana’s
assassination. It is important that I warn against any possible misreading: an interest in the
Rwandan state government under its first two presidents, specifically in the hope of
building historical veracity, does not make an academic researcher in any way an apologist
for a government’s or an individual’s actions. It would be absurd to confuse or conflate a
writer of a scholarly work of history with his subject. One writes about actors, big and
small, because of their impact on society, whether for good or for bad, and a well-
researched portrait of their lives can help shed light on the complex dynamics of society;
1
and without a well-documented account of Rwanda’s First and Second Republics, there is
a corrosive gap in Rwandan, African, and world history. Despite impediments, this paper is
hopefully a beginning ‘corrective’ to the paucity of information regarding the first two
presidents of an embryonic African nation.
1
Diamond (2005a: 17) makes a similar point: “What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate
from the explanation itself. Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate
it. That’s why psychologists try to understand the minds of murderers and rapists, why social historians try to
understand genocide, and why physicians try to understand the causes of human disease. Those investigators do not
seek to justify murder, rape, genocide, and illness. Instead, they seek to use their understanding of a chain of causes
to interrupt the chain.”
19
PART TWO
CHAPTER 4
UNDERPINNINGS OF RWANDAN IDENTITY: ‘TUTSI’ AND ‘HUTU’
POPULATIONS / SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF THE HUTU-
TUTSI ‘DIVIDE’ / SOCIO-POLITICAL STRUCTURE FROM HABYARIMANA’S
GRANDFATHER’S TIME
Underpinnings of Rwandan Identity: ‘Tutsi’ and ‘Hutu’ Populations
The two populations—Hutu and Tutsi—figure fundamentally and conspicuously in
every aspect of Kayibanda’s and Habyarimana’s lives, as well as in the development of
the country and in the lives of every Rwandan, from Mwami (king) Rwabugiri, at the end
of the nineteenth century, up to and through the 1994 genocide.
1
It is necessary, then, to
provide a brief overview of the origins of these two populations at the beginning of this
study in order to help establish and illuminate the social milieu which existed during the
two president’s grandfather’s time, from the 1880s, into the colonial period at the
beginning of the twentieth century and their births, in 1924 and 1937 respectively.
Although there have been many attempts and guesses, some disingenuous and
ideological, at placing “Hutu” and “Tutsi” in some historical framework, either political,
racial, feudal, or otherwise, Vansina’s observations appear to be exceedingly trustworthy in
terms of representing the most recent, thorough and objective scholarship. Important in his
1
“A Tutsi identity was shaped in relation to the wealth and power associated with royal and later government status
and institutions, while a Hutu awareness developed in relation to this other identity group and as a result of a situation
of subordination. This insight implies that ‘internal components and the interrelations among ethnic categories vary
over time’, and that power and the perceived nature of (the proximity to) power constitute an important factor in
understanding these changes.” (Ingelaere, 2010: 283). Also, see Newbury and Newbury (1999: 313; 31). C. Newbury
(1988: 51). Pottier (1995: 39) relates that “Overt ethnic friction may have been non-existent at the turn of the century,
but the ethnic divisions and ‘obvious hatred’ toward the Tutsi overlords, according to Grogan and Sharp (1900: 119)
were well entrenched by 1898, the time the Germans began to colonise Rwanda.”
20
findings is the mutability and complex history of the two terms. For example, “Tutsi” was
an endonym used by a small number of herders before the 1600s, then came to commonly
designate a “political elite within that fraction” after the founding of the Nyiginya kingdom
in the mid-seventeenth century. “Hutu”, by contrast, did not describe, early on, a particular
population, but was used by the elite to describe loutish behavior, including even Tutsi
servants. Vansina believes the menial Gakondo corporation are probably the first group to
have been designated as “Hutu”, followed by the Budaha, who were “servants in charge of
supplying provisions and services to the court”.
2
All people who lived outside the
kingdom, as well, were called “Hutu”. Within the military, by the middle of the eighteenth
century,
3
“Tutsi” designated a combatant, and a noncombatant was called “Hutu” because
they served the army. This relational framework appears to be the context in which the
first institutionalized oppositional use of the terms developed.
As most noncombatants happened to stem from lineages of farmers, the elite
eventually began to call all farmers “Hutu” and to oppose this word to “Tutsi”, now
applied to all herders,
4
whether they were of Tutsi origin or not.
5
2
Three corporations served the ideological foundation of the kingdom (c. 1700), ensuring the continuity of ritual life
by providing services to the king, the court, and the ritualists: “corporations of menials, corporations for the service of
the official herds, and military corporations composed of young men chosen from the families of distinguished
herders who were dependents of a local lord.” (Vansina, 2004: 58):
3
C.f. Pottier (2002: 13) holds that “For the period up to 1860 . . . historians know next to nothing about how the
terms ‘Twa’, ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ were used in social discourse; whether these terms denoted social or physical
classifications, for instance, is simply unclear.”
4
In Africa, the development and spread of cattle, as well as that of agriculture, is ancient, and predates the formation
of Hutu-Tutsi identities and the Kingdom of Rwanda; how and when cattle and farming first arrived in the Rwanda
region is not known. “African cattle were domesticated during the tenth millennium BP by delayed return Saharan
hunter-gatherers in unstable, marginal environments where predictable access to resources was a more significant
problem than absolute abundance. Pastoralism spread patchily across the continent according to regional variations in
the relative predictability of herding versus hunting and gathering. . . . The earliest African food producers were
mobile herders, not sedentary farmers. Herding developed in marginal areas, and then spread patchily across the
Sahara and to the south as climatic conditions deteriorated. . . . Although complex strategies for plant use developed
early in Africa (c. 17,000 BP), plant domestication was late (after 4000 BP), and occurred in many different
environments. (Marshall, 2002: 99, 100).
5
Vansina, ibid: 58.
21
This distinction spread across the kingdom with the armies. In addition, the view of
foreigner as “Hutu” spread to include the farmers north (Habyarimana’s ancestors) and
west of the central kingdom, effectively deepening and sealing the concept of
agriculturalist as “Hutu”, the exception being the marginal districts in the northeast, east
and south, which were herding communities, and so were considered as both Hutu and
Tutsi. In the mid-nineteenth century, “the distinction between chief of the long grass and
chief [sic] the land again institutionalized a division between Tutsi herders and Hutu
farmers”.
6
Newbury finds evidence that ethnic identities became prominent among lineages
during Rwabugiri’s reign (c. 1860-1895) and the creation of a centralized government:
With the arrival of Rwabugiri and his chiefs, classification into the category of
Hutu or Tutsi tended to become rigidified. Lineages that were wealthy in cattle and
had links to powerful chiefs were regarded as Tutsi; lineages lacking these
characteristics were relegated to non-Tutsi status.
7
Lemarchand, as well, emphasizes the central role of cattle ownership
8
(Map 1), pointing
out that when we try to understand the social stratification in Rwanda it is important to
note that an attribute of being designated one of the Tutsi population was to be successful
enough to be a lender in the cattle leasing arrangement, ubuhake
9
(or patron-client
6
Vansina, ibid: 58
7
Newbury, 1988: 11
8
It is valuable to recognize that cattle have been domesticated for 6,000 years in the Nile River region and for several
thousand years in the Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania regions, so that the movement of cattle to Rwanda
could have happened during that long period from different points of origin.
9
“. . . the patron-client ubuhake system closely connected the welfare of the Hutu client with the Tutsi patron. The
former provided services to the latter in exchange for protection and advocacy at the Mwami’s court. Nor was
ubuhake limited to a Hutu-Tutsi relationship; in some regions the custom may have been more prevalent between
Tutsi. . . a traditional Rwandan was not merely Hutu or Tutsi. Family, clan, and lineage ties were often more
determinative, whether on the local hill or in the often vicious succession struggles at court. In light of this relative
fluidity in the pre-colonial period, the subsuming of all identities under the supposed dualist struggle of Tutsi lord and
Hutu serf is one of the most regrettable legacies of European colonialism.” (Carney, 2011: p. 22).
22
relationship,
10
where the patron is called the shebuja and the client mugaragu), whereas
being designated a Hutu implied being without the resources to operate in and maintain a
lender’s position. (Although, Hutu could become Tutsi, and Tutsi sometimes remained
Tutsi while being a client of another, more powerful, Tutsi).
For a Hutu it [ubuhake] involved at least a year of full-time servitude doing
physical and menial work followed by years of part-time service at corvée labor of
two days out of five, later on, one day of seven. . . . “Ubuhake was, therefore, an
economic-political institution for the Tutsi who received its major economic
benefits and made use of its political possibilities . . . and which “granted them all
the social riches of nobility and high position with all their ensuing political
opportunities while . . . for the Hutu it was an economic institution without political
uses or benefits . . . that gave them little more than social existence as a Rwandan.”
. . . “In addition the Tutsi monopolized the offices of the royal court and the civil
and military administration with only rare and minor exceptions.
11
Linden offers another input into the nature of a Hutu/Tutsi distinguishing identity, from the
point of view of land holding, proposing that a true patron-client relationship grew out of
ubukonde
12
(Hutu-owned lands in the north leased out for usufruct) as farmers’ lands were
usurped by the king, rendering the now-landless ‘serfs’ at the mercy of Tutsi power
holders:
Land was alienated and marked out. The client was allowed two years in which to
cultivate, sending the occasional calabash to the patron, then had to provide the
landowner with two days labour in the sowing season . . . and during the May
sorghum harvest . . . By usurping the position of local lineage heads by sheer force,
“Newbury argues that only 10-15% of Rwandans were involved in ubuhake relationships in the late 19th
century. Ubuhake served more as a means to build alliances between politically-powerful Tutsi than as a means to
connect upper class Tutsi and Hutu peasants. For Newbury, ubuhake was neither universal, primordial, or exclusively
hierarchical, nor was it a “pervasive cultural institution in pre-colonial Rwanda” (Newbury, 2009: 329, cited in
Carney, ibid: n 43). For more on ubuhake see: Albert (1960: 51-52); Ruzirabwoba (2006: section 4.4.1); Saucier
(1974: 8); Maquet (1954: 154); Newbury (1988); Reyntjens (1985: 198); Vansina (2004: 66-67, 130-31);
Nkurikiyimfura (1994: 128-140); Botte et al (1969: 384-400).
10
In the most general sense, clientelism can be viewed as "a more or less personalized relationship between actors
(i.e., patrons and clients), or sets of actors, commanding unequal wealth, status or influence, based on conditional
loyalties and involving mutually beneficial transactions." (Lemarchand, 1972: 69).
11
Codere (1973: 18-19).
12
See Mamdani (2002: 65-66) for comparison of ubukonde (lineage control over land), igikingi (pasturage) and
ubureetwa (a form of clientship).
23
or by interfering in land disputes and litigation, the chiefs came to control more and
more land, exacting crop dues and labour from the unprotected serfs.”
13
13
Linden (1977: 10-16).
Map 1: Distribution of Sites with Early Domestic Cattle
24
Rwabukumba also emphasizes the land contract, suggesting the patron-client relationship
would have developed sometime after the nineteenth century, as the narratives he collected
from the second half of the eighteenth century led him to this consideration:
The meticulous study of these chronicles tells us nothing about the relations
between Tutsi and Hutu, or, more widely, on the relations of dependence. We know
only, having proceeded to the monographs of the hills, that the first waves of land-
clearers contained as many Hutu as Tutsi.
14
Rwabukumba, in examining the reasoning behind Hutus entering into client-patron
contracts, summed up the two forms of personal subordination that developed as follows:
Why, once they had established income from land, did Hutu make ties of personal
dependence? Less to obtain a cow from their patron than to escape corvée labor:
never, in fact, did a Hutu client do agricultural work for his patron, even if it was
his land patron. If he managed to be a good client, he was exempt from corvée
labor. . . . When a Hutu enjoyed relative success through his land and pasturage, he
looked for the protection of the leader of the army into which he was incorporated
to defend him against the greed of the lord of his hill.
At the death of Rwabugiri, in I895, personal subordination thus knew two forms.
The one form, recent and generalized, was based on control of the land by a
minority, itself dependent on the court. So, every Rwandan, Tutsi or Hutu,
underwent, to preserve the usage of their land, the requirements (differing
according to their social status) of a land patron. The other form, born at the
beginning of the 19th century and bound to the ownership of cattle, turned out
much more restrictive and constituted a network the shape of which was
determined by land dependence.
15
Meanwhile, the German protectorate (1897-1916), followed by the Belgian
mandate, then trusteeship (1922-1959), continued to imagine that “Hutu” was a special
14
From chronicles of the second half of the eighteenth century, in Rwabukumba (1974: p. 11). “My name is Semahe,
son of Rwangabo, Rugwabiza, Cyajumba, Nyanzu, Ruremezi. I will stop there. We are Abaremezi from Abanyiginya.
Ruremezi came first to Nyaruhengeri, with Bahinge. He cleared the forest. There was at that time a law which
allowed people to clear the forest, to live there and to allow relatives to live there. When destitute people came, we
allowed them to settle there, and they became as brothers. Rugwabiza, my grandfather, had cows obtained through his
daughters’ dowries, and cows acquired from bartering beans. He was no one’s client, but he had put himself under the
protection of the leader of the army in order to have his properties and goods guarded. Only my father, Rwangabo,
had a patron, a Tutsi who was called Rindiro. But it was Rugwabiza, my grandfather who was the first to know a land
chief, for whom he had to do work, or pay services in food. (Rwabukumba (ibid: 11).
15
Rwabukumba (ibid: 24-25).
25
racial designation (following the racial theories that J. H. Speke’s book had promoted
16
),
and to assume that this label was accepted by the indigenous populations.
17
The
celebration by the colonists of the Tutsi aristocratic class, who were called by some “black
Europeans” because they were tall, slender and graceful, with aquiline noses and straight
hair, became extended to all Tutsi, under the mistaken assumption that they were
universally part of a political elite, yet those who actually exercised power “accounted for
less than 10 percent of all Tutsi”.
18
The Hutu insurrection that broke out from 1897 to 1899 in the small districts in the
northwest part of the country, where Habyarimana’s grandparents lived, was driven by the
resistance to having any Tutsi in their midst (which presence would signal a beginning of
subservience to the central court). This is a particularly significant event, as Vansina
points out,
because it proves without any ambiguity not only that the population at this time
was conscious of a great divide between Tutsi and Hutu, but also that the
antagonism between these two social categories had already broken in the open.
One can therefore summarily reject the views of those who attribute the distinction
between Tutsi and Hutu as well as the engendering of their mutual hostility to each
other to the first Europeans. The Europeans merely adopted a practice they found
16
John Hanning Speke (1863, The Discovery of the Source of the Nile). “The "Hamitic Hypothesis" was widely held
among colonial administrators and missionaries. This hypothesis held that "everything of value found in Africa was
brought there by the Hamites, allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race. . . . Speke was a great propagator of this
hypothesis in the interlacustrine region: when he discovered the kingdom of Buganda with its sophisticated political
organization, he attributed this civilisation to a race of nomadic herdsmen related to the 'Hamitic' Galla. Pastoralism
and its attributes thus received an aura of cultural superiority ((Sanders, 1969:521, 528-530). And, “The
attractiveness of this theory for the Europeans was that physical qualities (the Nilo-hamitic physiognomy) could be
linked to mental and intellectual capacities: the 'Hamites'—in Rwanda the Tutsi—were born rulers and entitled to a
past and a future almost as honourable as their European "cousins" (Linden, 1977:2). Collaboration with the Tutsi
could thus be easily supported ideologically.
17
Newbury & Newbury (2000: 839): “Hutu” were never a homogeneous group, not in historical, social, or cultural
terms. Despite the differences among Hutu, however, the “dual colonialism” of central court administrators, under the
suzerainty of first German and then Belgian rule, brought an awareness of shared exploitation within the expanding
powers of the state.
18
On the reasoning behind these figures, see Helen Codere (1973: 70).
26
on the spot and the terminology they used to express it derived from the speech of
the local elites.
19
Potentially significant, too, because it happened in the district where Habyarimana’s
grandparents lived, and while we have no record of their consideration of these events,
there is no doubt that they were aware of the existence of a Hutu-Tutsi distinction and the
negative correlation it carried. They do not, however, seem to have harbored any prejudice
toward the Tutsi, according to one of their grandsons.
20
Adding another dimension to our consideration of how the opposing identities of
Hutu and Tutsi materialized is the question of uburetwa.
21
By the time Habyarimana’s
grandfather was a young man, in early 1900, in addition to the exercise of the unequal
patron-client ubuhake contract, there was the onerous imposition of a mandatory work tax
called uburetwa, which only Hutu owed because of their tenure of arable land, and only
19
Vansina, 2004: 138. See Vansina (op. cit.: 198), where he systematically illuminates the history of the Rwandan
people, thereby putting to rest the Eurocentric prejudice of ethnicity created by the colonists, and the ideologically
formulated racist propaganda propagated after independence by the Hutu génocidaires: “As we can see from the
above examples, “There never were successive immigrations of Twa foragers [a pygmoid people, comprising about
1% of the population], Hutu farmers, and Tutsi herders since these social categories were only slowly developed as a
means of labeling persons who were in the country. The settlement history of Rwanda is actually very ancient and
quite complex.” Sellström et al (1996: 12) also point to hardened Hutu/Tutsi definitions before the colonial impact:
“Rwabugiri's administration (1860-1895) imposed a harsh regime on the formerly semi-autonomous Tutsi and Hutu
lineages, confiscating their lands and breaking their political power. Rwabugiri amplified feudal labour systems, in
particular the uburetwa, . . . He also manipulated social categories, and introduced an "ethnic" differentiation between
Tutsi and Hutu based on historical social positions. Polarization and politicization of ethnicity thus began before the
advent of European colonialism.” Also see Newbury, 1988: 82.
20
Personal communication.
21
Pottier (2002:13), “Uburetwa, the hated corvée labour service through which populations regained access to the
lands they had lost to Rwabugiri, was the central institution; it was restricted to Hutu.” And Viret (2010: n.p.):
“Though the Belgians abolished several existing tributes, including those in cattle and foodstuffs in 1924, such as
imponoke, indabukirano and abatora *(Reyntjens, 1985: 132), it also generalized uburetwa (a tax consisting of one
day of labor per week), and considerably increased its base to all able-bodied adult men in the Rwandan territory.
They also created akazi, the requisition of men for unpaid labor in public works. This taxation policy was integrated
into the ethnic framework through which the colonial power considered society, and only the Hutu population was
subject to uburetwa *(Newbury, 1988: 141). In 1949 all Rwandans had to redeem the value of the uburetwa they
owed for the annual cash amount of 19.50 francs **(Newbury, 1988: 146; Reyntjens, 1985: 137). Until it was
abolished in the aftermath of World War II, the desire to evade uburetwa constituted one of the main motives for the
departure of emigrants into exile: 425,000 Rwandans left the country, heading to Uganda and Tanganyika
*(Reyntjens, 1985: 141).” For more on uburetwa, see (Newbury 1978: 21, 1988: 13; Vidal 1969: 399; Chrétien 1985:
150), enjoyed freedom from uburetwa (Czekanowski 1917: 270– 1; Iliffe, 1987: 62; Jefremovas 1991a: 68; Newbury
1988: 140; Reyntjens 1985: 133– 4; Rwabukumba and Mundagizi 1974: 22).
27
Hutu were obliged to perform the menial work required by the chief of the land. This was
in stark contrast to the less humiliating obligations of the chief’s Tutsi client[s], and
resulted in a brewing revolt among the Hutu as a result of years of being exploited. Pottier
also points to uburetwa as an example of Hutu and Tutsi identities taking on a strong
ethnic character before colonial influences, citing Czekanowski’s research in 1907-08 that
led him [Czekanowski] to remark that “the Tutsi ruled Rwanda as a conquered territory in
which uburetwa was the core of subjection”.
22
In summary, the earliest appearance of the notion of “Hutu” could have stemmed
from certain early concepts of polite social behavior, as well as designating a servant, from
which meaning “Hutu” was expanded to mean “servants in charge of supplying provisions
and services to the court”, thus by the middle of the eighteenth century, when the military
had reached a significant size, “Hutu” meant those noncombatants who served the army.
From early on, “Hutu” also meant ‘foreigner’, and this view spread to include the farmers
north (Habyarimana’s ancestors) and west of the central kingdom, effectively deepening
22
In Pottier, 2002: 13. Iliffe,1987: 60-64 gives the following bleak picture of uburetwa: “. . . the crucial issue for
most Hutu in pre-colonial Rwanda was access to arable land. This was controlled by Hutu lineages until King
Rwabugiri (1860-1895) . . . asserted Tutsi control over arable land, first at the centre of the kingdom and then,
increasingly, in its newly conquered peripheries. Tutsi chiefs gradually broke the autonomy and solidarity of Hutu
lineages, leaving the elementary families vulnerable to exploitation. The chiefs gained direct control over unoccupied
land and indirect control over occupied lineage land, which they asserted by demanding tribute in return for the right
of continued occupation. The tribute was paid partly in kind and partly in labour on the chiefs' fields. In the most
fully dominated regions, this corvée, known as ubuletwa, amounted to two days' work in every five . . . Ubuletwa was
imposed on the holding rather than the individual, so that a landholder with no other adult male in his family might
find it especially difficult both to meet this obligation and to grow his family's food. . . The wholly landless man
became a day-labourer (umucancuro) cultivating for another from dawn to noon in return for a day's food,
conventionally defined as a basket of beans. Those slightly better situated combined a proportion of day-labour with a
plot of land inadequate to provide independent subsistence. [according to Dr. Vidal’s informant]:
The wife had no clothes and must go and cultivate to obtain a used cow-skin. The day-labourer was a pauper who
cultivated for everything: milk, clothes, food. He ate no matter what: a goat which had died suddenly, an aborted
heifer. . . They were the very lowest people in the society. . . The day-labourers were despised. Look: I am drinking
beer with you and other people of my rank; a day-labourer could not come and sit with us; he stayed on one side
waiting for someone, moved by compassion, to call him and give him the dregs left at the bottom of the pot.
“Dr. Vidal's informants declared that day-labourers—defined as those who worked for others but never employed
others—were about half of all cultivators in central Rwanda.”
28
and sealing the concept of agriculturalist as “Hutu”. Later, the distinction between chief of
the land and chief of the long grass subsequently institutionalized a division between Hutu
farmers and Tutsi herders. The notion of “Tutsi” began as a term for a combatant in the
military, as well as for a political elite among herders, eventually coming to mean someone
successful enough to be a lender in the cattle leasing arrangement, ubuhake.
Through two centuries of the development of these two descriptors, “Hutu” and
“Tutsi”, the monopolization of power among the kingdom’s ruling elite by members of the
Tutsi population tightened and spread, usurping Hutu peasants’ lands through ubukonde,
23
and imposing an onerous one-sided tax, uburetwa, only on Hutu. By the time of
Habyarimana’s grandparents’ generation (c. 1880—1950), Rwandan society recognized
two distinct populations that were identified as “Hutu” and “Tutsi”, and which had unequal
status accomplished through a patron-client system, and a monopolized vertical hold on
power from the king all the way down to the level of the clan on the hill.
24
Socio-Psychological Effects Of The Hutu-Tutsi ‘Divide’
Attending the definitional and operational development of the appellations “Hutu”
and “Tutsi” was the parallel development of separate self-imageries. That is, the integral
and inseparable descriptors “Hutu” and “Tutsi” came to represent two different selves
within two different subcultures. The Hutu in patron-client contracts, in general, suffered
23
A system “characterized by a patrilineal management and succession of lands with concessions to leasers or land
tenants in exchange for fees and services.” (André, 2003: 153).
24
In Ingelaere, 2010: 274, “If, as David Newbury suggests, Rwanda’s ethnic identities are socially produced and
‘deeply influenced by power’ such that ‘changes in these categories are related to changes in the power context’. . .”
(Newbury and Newbury, 2000: 874).
29
to a certain degree from an inferiority complex,
25
and the spread of ubuhake amongst the
Hutu weakened them,
since individuals increasingly sought protection with rich patrons rather than in the
solidarity of their lineage as of old. . . . the imiryango [clans, or patrilineages]
began to break down as some of their members communally fulfilled obligations to
abatware [chiefs] . . . while others sought individual immunity in the patronage of a
powerful noble. With their social supports undermined, the Hutu were ruthlessly
exploited; by the end of the nineteenth century the imposition of Tutsi rule had
reduced many peasants to the level of destitute journeymen, wandering in search of
food, work and protection. . . . The breakdown of the Hutu lineages within the
Rwandan State was correlated with the transformation of the Tutsi nobility into a
well defined social class whose eating habits, deportment, culture and ideology
were designed to instill, in Maquet’s celebrated phrase, ‘a premise of inequality’
[my italics], which was a charter for their monopoly of the surplus wealth created
by Hutu labour. . . . Hutu were invariably segregated for military training
26
. . . .
Confronted with the elaborate paraphernalia of court life, with its nuanced poetry
and measured disdain, the peasant outside Tutsi patronage readily came to believe
that, apart from being physically smaller and materially poorer, he was
intellectually and morally inferior [my italics]. Marx’s statement that ‘the ideas of
the ruling class are in each epoch the ruling ideas . . . the class which is ruling
material power in society is, at the same time, its ruling spiritual power’ sums up
the situation.
27
25
“Tutsi ideology thoroughly dominated the Hutu of central Rwanda and had been internalised, with the resulting
psychological dependence and sense of inferiority that limited the potential for creative political action, even among
the Hutu counter-elite.” (Linden, 1977: 234). In Maton, 1994: 9, “The colonial administration strengthened at the
beginning the power of the leaders, who (except in the region of Ruhengeri) were largely Tutsi-ministers. On the one
hand obliged to share the power with the Belgians, these Tutsi leaders were often opposed to the colonial power and
that of the Roman Catholic Church, which had a monopoly on the public services of education and public health. . .
The farmers-Hutus were later Christianized, but more quickly than the Tutsis. This Christianization accelerated in the
poor farmers is maybe less surprising than it seems at first sight. First of all, education was for the poor people a
means of social advancement. It is an economic explanation that is certainly valid, but insufficient. There are other
considerations, which are a matter of philosophy and cultural anthropology. At first, the theology of the White
Fathers and the Jesuits, in this period neo-Thomism, made sacred the fertility, the fundamental mythical notion in the
pre-Christian African thought. Then, the biblical story of liberation sometimes suits the poor people of Africa
admirably. To what extent Hutu had really been exploited by Tutsi is not too relevant concerning this subject. What is
relevant is that they were considered inferior by the Tutsi, which were their only reference point to judge their
situation. Besides, Tutsi did nothing to reassure Hutu. For example, the archetypal metaphors of the Tutsi in this
period are always the priest’s ‘stick’ and the warrior’s lance.
26
It seems probable that a predominantly Hutu military continued ‘automatically’ into the post-independence socio-
political structure, since it naturally fit into the virulent anti-Tutsi policy of the first president, Grégoire Kayibanda.
27
Linden, 1970: 17-18. Marx’s statement, however, is only valid when pertaining to a ruling class that has
legitimacy in the eyes of the public. In Rwanda, for example, once a significant number of educated Hutu had
escaped the premise of their inequality, the Tutsi rulers lost legitimacy and were deposed in the Hutu-led two-pronged
movement for the country’s independence from the Tutsi monarchy and the Belgian colonists.
30
This inequality of the two ‘selves’ was embedded in tradition, as pointed out by
Lemarchand:
“Rwanda is unique in the sheer abundance of traditions purporting to show the
superiority of the Tutsi over the other castes, and in the cumulative impact of these
traditions on society as a whole.
28
Examples of this traditional Tutsi belief in their superiority are found in some Rwandan
folktales, such as the one in which the following lines purport to claim the historic right of
the Tutsis to rule, “Dear are the dogs and the rats [the lowly Hutu and Twa], giving way to
the cows and the drum” [the pastoralist Tutsi],
29
and in the lines from another legend
propagated by the Tutsi that professes the disorder that would ensue without the Tutsi as
leaders, “The king and the Tutsi [were] the heart of the country. Should the Hutu chase
them away, they would lose all they have and Imana [God] would punish them.”
30
But,
the quintessential “superiority” myth that carried the idea of a caste-like social order
(including the third social group, the Twa, a pygmoid, mainly forest-dwelling people, who
comprise only one percent of the population), is the following one based appropriately on
milk, the heart of the Tutsi pastoralist culture:
There was Kigwa, who fell from heaven and had three sons: Gatwa, Gahutu, and
Gatutsi. When he decided to choose his successor, he entrusted each of the three
sons a pot of milk to watch over during the night. At daybreak, Gatwa had drunk
the milk; Gahutu had fallen asleep and in the carelessness of the sleep, had spilt the
milk; and only Gatutsi had kept watch throughout the night, and only his milk pot
was safe. So it was clear to Kigwa that Gatutsi should be the successor and by that
fact should be exempt of any menial tasks. Gahutu was to be his servant. The utter
28
Lemarchand 1970: 34. However, it is important to bear in mind what Catherine and David Newbury (1991: 294)
have written about ethnicity, that “it is best understood neither as an enduring, unchanging element to social
formations nor as an instantaneous, recent invention. Instead we see it as an identity contextually configured, one
which can be understood only through close familiarity with the history of social relations and political power.”
29
The symbol of the mwamiship was the royal drum, Kalinga, on which the testicles of killed powerful enemies
were tied.
30
Lemarchand op. cit., cited in D’Hertefelt 1960.
31
unreliability of Gatwa was to make him only a clown in society. As a result, Gatutsi
received cattle and command whereas Gahutu would acquire cattle only through
the services to Gatutsi, and Gatwa was condemned to hunger and gluttony and
would not acquire cattle.
31
These myths were part of a widely diffused set of social elements that added to the
psychological distancing between the Hutu and Tutsi populations,
32
and which give
evidence to Lemarchand’s statement that “All cultures are myth sustained in that they
derive their legitimacy from a body of values and beliefs which tend to embellish or falsify
historical truth.”
33
The historical ‘truth’, in the case of the above myths, was a fabrication
that advanced an historical social inequality:
It is not just that the country’s oral and written history provides a pre-eminent
example of the effects of ideological restraints in a feudal society, but also that a
particular account of the past, shaped in the Tutsi court and promulgated by the
Catholic clergy, influenced the political consciousness of Rwandans and Europeans
alike.
34
The ideological restraints, as well as the political consciousness of the Hutu, were
significantly heightened in the 1950s by an increasingly vociferous denouncement of the
unfairness of the cattle clientship
35
system, and of the disenfranchisement of the Hutu
31
Twagilimana, 2003.
32
André Sibomana (1997: 84) gives the following example of a type of cultural ‘distancing’: “. . . in the royal court,
there was particular form of war poetry. A man would gain credit in the eyes of those around him if he spent the
evenings praising murders carried out during the war . . . This form of poetry does not exist in Hutu culture.”
33
Lemarchand, cited in Linden, 1970: 2.
34
Linden, op. cit.: 2.
35
Rwabukumba and Mundangazi, attempting to historically place the beginnings of the cattle clientship
arrangement, write that, “At the beginning of the 19th century the network of personal dependency between the
mwami and the Tutsi lineages was based upon the armies and the ritual functions. It is only at the end of Yuhi
Gahindiro's reign (ca. I830) that other types of personal dependency, especially ubuhake, were established, as shown
by the traditional record of a lineage of Tutsi diviners.” (Rwabukumba and Mundangazi, 1974: 6). C.f. But Vansina
cites evidence that the ubuhake contract developed much earlier, in the 1600s, under Ruganzu Ndori, who founded
the Nyiginya kingdom, as a military-supported political instrument, so that the “patron-client relationship linked each
of the great chiefs directly to the king . . . ties of this sort were common in the region, whereas no other realm knew a
military organization similar to the one the Nyiginya developed during the eighteenth century,” and that this
“combination of multiple, permanent armies based on an hereditary recruitment from lineages living all over the
country and linked to the management of lands and herds, also spread all over the country, led to an effective
centralization . . . The main theme of the internal history of the kingdom from the end of the eighteenth century
32
under the unremitting hold on power by the Tutsi, who were a distinct minority—about
15% of the population. It is this exclusionary Tutsi hold on power (including education)
radiating from the central administration that the people in the northwest region, which
included Habyarimana’s ancestors, had to contend with, and more or less successfully
countered for a time. But, the court finally absorbed all the outlying regions of the
kingdom to become a symbol of oppression, and thus the focal point of the Hutu
revolutionary movement: the overwhelming vote in the general election in 1959 for the
dissolution of the mwamiship showed how strongly the Hutu resented the Tutsi-
constructed socio-political system.
36
We shall see that in only two generations after the
establishment of the Catholic missions and the arrival of Belgian administration, the power
of the mwami and the privileged position of the Tutsi would be challenged by an educated
Hutu elite (évolués) and overthrown,
37
at a time when Habyarimana was a young man
returning from a year’s college in the Congo.
Socio-Political Structure From Habyarimana’s Grandfather’s Time
The Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonial administration, from the
advent of their arrival, had the most profound effects on Rwanda. One of the earliest was
onward is the hold over power sustained by the high nobility at court.” (Vansina, 2004: 197).
36
It should be noted that a very small group of Tutsi drawn mainly from two clans monopolized most of the
opportunities provided by indirect rule. It has never been valid to imply that a homogeneous Tutsi or Hutu
community existed at any time. Below the small indigenous Tutsi elite were not only virtually all of Rwanda’s Hutu
population, but the large majority of their fellow Tutsi, as well. Most Tutsi were not much more privileged in social
or economic terms than the Hutu. Therefore, the deepening of the Hutu/Tutsi ethnic cleavage was accompanied by
social distancing, giving more nuance to the double value of the term Tutsi: Tutsi as a social group with a distant
ethnic substrate designating the group of lineages that are mainly pastoralists, and Tutsi as a ruling caste made up of a
few lineages which are closest to the monarchy. On the eve of colonisation, it was almost exclusively in the latter
sense that the Rwandese used the term Tutsi. E Gasana et al “Rwanda” in ACDESS (ed) (1999) 145, cited in
Gaparayi, 2000.
37
Linden has remarked that Kayibanda, the leader of the revolution in the 1950s, and one of the authors of the
Bahutu Manifesto, expressed a clear hatred of the Tutsi and the mwamiship. (Personal correspondence with the
author).
33
the change in names influenced by baptism, and the French language used in mission
schools and state bureaucracy. Nearly everyone received Christian names. Thus,
Habyarimana’s grandfather, father and himself were named Paul, Jean-Pierre, and Juvénal,
respectively.
It isn’t known how Habyarimana’s father chose the name “Juvénal” for his son.
Since Habyarimana’s father wasn’t schooled in the European classics, it is rather doubtful
that he could have known about Juvenal the Roman satirist. But, even though the writer’s
work would have had little meaning to a farmer in the hills of Rwanda, his name on the list
of exalted classicists might have been enough of an attraction to suggest its adoption. The
missionaries most likely had an inventory of Christian names that could have been used for
quick reference. Another possibility is that Habyarimana was named after Juvenal of
Narni, a fourth century Bishop and Confessor living in Narni, Umbria, Italy, but who was
born in Africa, the birthplace being relevant. Habyarimana’s grandfather’s name, Paul, is
clearly a Biblical reference, and Habyarimana’s father’s name, Jean-Pierre, combines the
Biblical figures John and Peter, as well as being a very common name among the French-
speaking culture from which the White Fathers came. (Habyarimana’s future wife has the
name Agathe, from the Greek and meaning ‘good’, and also being the name of a third
century saint. Perhaps some would find not a little sarcasm in these benevolent meanings
for the name—say, in the flavor of Juvenal’s satires—since Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe,
is, at the time of this writing, facing efforts by various groups trying to get her extradited
from France to stand trial in Rwanda as a perpetrator of genocide).
34
How the adoption of these non-Rwandan names affected self perception in the
ancient Kinyarwandan language community, as it was at the beginning of the twentieth
century, is impossible to know now, a hundred years later, but it raises an important
question concerning identity, especially people’s relation to the Church. To suddenly
adopt a completely new religion, one never before encountered, is a significant act, and
adopting a name from that religion and the culture within which it was presented, would be
necessarily reinforcing.
38
The church missions blatantly disregarded the integrity of
indigenous culture by insisting that ‘their’ newly baptized flock have Christian names in
order to authenticate and deserve entry into the faith, but the newly faithful complied, and
have retained the practice of using Christian-French first names; it was more than a short-
lived fascination, or trend, and demonstrates a permanent step away from one aspect of
tradition, and with implications that are difficult to gauge, but should nonetheless be
highlighted.
Of course, the most important effect the Church had on Rwandans and their future
was the introduction of literacy. It is striking, when considering Habyarimana’s childhood
development, that little more than 17 years before he was born, Rwanda had no written
language; the monarch and court were illiterate and ruled over an illiterate citizenry, and
even on the brink of Rwanda’s independence, over half the Hutu population had no reading
and writing skills. Illiteracy tends to support and prolong subjugation in traditional
societies, because the populace is trapped in a culture whose past, present, and imagined
future are greatly influenced by oral tradition as a descriptor of ‘being-in-the-world’. That
38
I am reminded here of when I first studied Chinese, and the Chinese instructor gave us all Chinese names, the
written characters he chose having very flattering meanings. It immediately gave us a sense of pride, as well as had
the effect of drawing us into the language; we suddenly ‘belonged’ in a way we otherwise wouldn’t have.
35
is, oral history cannot construct a scientific methodology, so it necessarily holds and
transmits a reality that is a conflated world view mixing practicality, as regards organismic
survival techniques (the profane), with the supernatural, as regards confronting the
mysterious (or sacred), and so resists challenge. The result is a nearly static social
structure that is highly resistant to change, because any attempt at alteration threatens the
power holders’ grip, but, even more, undermines an entire belief system incorporating the
life-death cycle: any change to or break in this ‘chain with nature’ affects an individual’s
position in the social contract, and for this change to occur would require a serious
dislocation—usually brought about by an external force. The most common such
dislocation occurring throughout history is perhaps the change in society caused by defeat
in war and the victors imposing a new social structure, including a different religion and
language. Rwanda had, since at least the seventeenth century, been immune to invasion
because of its location, geography, and its ability to field a formidable army. The
kingdom’s relative isolation, and the central court’s powerful military, allowed the
kingship to flourish, and, in turn, its own, self-serving oral account of history to prevail.
Rwanda’s indigenous language, Kinyarwanda, part of the great sweep of Bantu-based
languages spreading from West-Central to South-Central Africa, had only a spoken form
before colonization. There were no roads or villages in Rwanda, the population effectively
dispersed and separated by countless hills, with very little flatland, resulting in little
movement within the country and, thus, considerable ignorance about what was happening
in distant hills and the rest of the kingdom. The result was a ‘captured’, illiterate peasantry
having no chance to construct an alternative reality. Habyarimana was born only thirty
36
years after the building of the first schools, set up by Catholic missionaries. Education,
and the effects of literacy on society, as we shall see, were to eventually jump-start the
movement toward independence and the formation of a state, as well as the end of the
kingship.
No Village Pattern
From the earliest demarcations of the Rwandan territory,
39
and continuing into
Habyarimana’s presidency, there was no geographical or socio-political unifying concept
among the peoples of the area now known as the country of Rwanda: they would have
identified themselves as part of a specific lineage, connected to a certain clan, and residing,
as did their forefathers, in a particular hill area—the essential political unit:
Real villages do not exist. . . . Today, [1969] as in the more distant past, the hill
remains the primary focus of political activity in the countryside. Beyond the hill
there is relatively little sense of unity among the rural communities even where
caste solidarities are most in evidence, fragmentation and parochialism are the rule
rather than the exception.
40
The hill (in each of the roughly 80 provinces) was a close neighborhood grouping of
households varying “from a handful to more than a dozen”,
41
and managed by a hill chief
elected from one of the households. The hill chiefs were responsible to subchiefs who, in
39
In Vansina, 2004: 35: “Rwanda’ literally means ‘the surface occupied by a swarm or a scattering’; hence its
semantic derivation is ‘a large space,’ and it was always used with a qualifier of locality. . . . The word was so little
tied to the Nyiginya kingdom [17
th
century] that in a tale one hears Ndori tell his troops during a campaign against his
enemy Nzira, king of Bugara: ‘Spread out in the Rwanda of Nzira.’ Here ‘Rwanda’ refers to the country of the
enemy. One concludes . . . that before Ndori’s arrival the only known territorial ethnonyms referred to the small
principalities to which they were linked, either by the use of Abanyarwanda + X, or by the use of a toponym such as
Abariza (meaning ‘people of Burial’) or Abanyanduga (meaning ‘people of Nduga’). No ethnonym is found to
designate all the inhabitants of central Rwanda in opposition to the mountain people of the north and the west.”
40
Lemarchand, 1970: 16-17. Even after independence, and the constitutional and legal changes had begun to impose
a relative bureaucratic unity across the hills and provinces, the dynamics of governing were riddled with undisguised
regional favoritism and nepotism, to such a degree that Rwanda’s first president was forced from office by a coup
d’état. Habyarimana, himself, did not escape the demands of a certain regional paternalism.
41
Albert, 1960: 53.
37
turn, were under the authority of the chiefs of the fields and chiefs of the pastures, who
were roughly equal to what might be called ‘governors’ of each province. “All the chiefs
were appointed by the mwami and were directly responsible to him.”
42
Each hill had a
name, which had the administrative function of locating households; this was important for
the hill chief in assigning responsibility to those under his jurisdiction for the prestations it
was his duty to obtain for the council of paramount chiefs (batware), who resided at the
court of the central kingdom, and were primarily responsible for ensuring the continuity of
divine custom. These goods and services, procured for the court, typically consisted of the
farmers being called up as soldiers, as labor gangs for agricultural work or construction,
for collecting foodstuffs and for providing hand-crafted products such as baskets, milk
containers, spears, bows and arrows, and hoes.
Northwest Region Semi-Autonomous
Habyarimana’s relatives, cultivators and breeders in the Bushiru area of Gisenyi
Province (Map 2), in the northwestern part of Rwanda, managed to escape these
prestations, in contrast to most Hutus, who were situated in the central kingdom.
Subsistence farmers, like 85% of the population, they owned a few cows, but were not,
traditionally, principally herders. What set them apart from the majority of Hutu was their
distance from the central court and their belonging to an area that had steadfastly remained
largely outside the control of the mwami (king). Therefore, when trying to understand
Habyarimana’s positioning regarding the Hutu/Tutsi identity problem, especially as it
affected his presidency, it is salient to know how uniquely removed, historically,
42
Ibid.: 53.
38
Habyarimana’s home region was in relation to the area controlled by the central court,
because it gives us an idea of how differently Habyarimana’s attitude toward Tutsi would
develop as opposed to the virulent anti-Tutsi attitude of Grégoire Kayibanda—the central
author of the Hutu Manifesto, and the driving force for the abolition of the monarchy and
the independence movement—who grew up in central Rwanda, near the capital of the
central court, where Tutsi control and suppression was most concentrated. The cattle
clientship
43
pattern, for example, was primarily found in the area of the central kingdom,
43
“At the micro level [the central kingdom’s] organization was supported by a cattle-based clientship contract called
ubuhake. It came into being when a person of lower status in search of protection and participation in the prestige
conferred by the possession of cattle offered his services to a person of higher status, owner of cattle. If the latter
accepted the former as his client (umugaragu) he entrusted one or more cows to him and became his patron (shebuja).
The umugaragu had to pay allegiance to the shebuja and to render services, for which he received the cattle in
usufruct, while the shebuja would protect his client, especially in the event of judicial or political trouble; he kept the
bare ownership of the cattle. The arrangement could be terminated by any one of the parties at any moment. The
political importance of ubuhake was enormous: although it was individual this institution was a powerful political
weapon in the hands of the Tutsi. It created a bond of friendship between the ruling minority of Tutsi and the mass of
Map 2: Habyarimana’s Ancestral Region
39
while in the almost singularly Hutu region of the Northwest, where Habyarimana grew up,
there was a land-lease system (ubukonde) controlled by the Hutu through patrimonial and
lineage-based local traditions—as opposed to the cattle leasing system (ubuhake) mostly
controlled by the Tutsi—and which was still practiced post-independence.
In the North and the Northwest in particular, the legitimacy of the imported
authorities was minimal. This was, at least in part, due to the fact that the political
conception of Tutsi law clashed with the patrimonial and lineage-based local Hutu
traditions there; the Tutsi turned the land-based ubukonde patron-client relationship
. . . into a more formal political clientship structure.
44
The Bushiru-Mulera region, where the hills around Habyarimana’s grandfather’s home
were located, remained one of the last areas to come under state control.
45
At this time, the
central core of Rwanda, which was controlled by the mwami’s court, included the central
plateau, Gisaka in the east, and all of the western region (Map 2). Certain areas not under
strict control by the central government found themselves slowly being forced into the
administrative structure’s rigid classification imposed by Mwami Rwabugiri (c. 1867-
1895), which defined the population that was rich in cattle and with connections to
powerful chiefs as “Tutsi”, and classified the rest of the population—the majority—as
Hutu. But it did much more: by giving only a precarious usufruct to the Hutu, the Tutsi kept ultimate control over
cattle, the symbol of political, economic and social power. This enabled them to specialize themselves in politics,
thanks to their hold over a sizeable part of the country’s goods, without the need to integrate their own labour in the
productive process.” (Reyntjens, 1987: 72); also see Lemarchand 1970: 39.
44
Reyntjens, 1987: 71-77. And Nyrop, 1974: 7, “The Mwami's control was strongest in the immediate areas
surrounding the capital, Nyanza, and in areas of easy access, but his control decreased in proportion to the distance
vassal chiefs were located from the Mwami's power center.” Also see Linden, 1970: 62, “Rwaza [Habyarimana’s
grandfather’s home area] might have been in a different country and the northern Fathers saw themselves almost in a
separate mission. The Tutsi were absent except on the Mulera plain.” On the Mwamiship, also see d’Hertefelt, 1960:
61-72; and Maquet, 1954: 117-150 (Maquet’s findings are now disputed because of the small sampling of his
research area).
45
Nyrop, op. cit.. “In the Hutu-controlled areas of the northwest there was a continuing struggle for hegemony
throughout the history of the kingdom. This area was never brought under the complete control of the Mwami's
government, and it is from here that the strongest Hutu influences emanated in the decade preceding independence.”
And in Reyntjens, 1987: 72, “In the North and on the Western edge of the Zaire-Nile watershed the authority of the
Mwami was more nominal than real.” Also,
40
Hutu”.
46
This rigid social order was reinforced first by the German colonial administration
and then the Belgian protectorate.
47
Rwabugiri also institutionalized corvée, food prestations, and the igikingi system
(in which chiefs appointed by the king held the right to the land, and became a symbol of
the “Tutsi’s feudalistic domination over the Hutu”),
48
as well as forcibly establishing new
capitals in the north.
As the King’s control extended over the outlying principalities, the nature and style
of his authority over the whole land changed gradually towards an ever greater
administrative centralisation and more authoritarian forms of political control.
49
Hutu in the Buama and Bushiru area adjoining Habyarimana’s grandfather’s region had
risen in revolt in 1918 against the traditionally-entrenched Tutsi-ruled central government,
initiating attacks on isolated Tutsi settlements
50
and “refusing to pay traditional prestations
(A payment of money for a toll or duty; or the rendering of a service), as well as refusing
passage through their territories to Tutsi, which prompted a retaliatory expedition by
mwami Musinga to bring the region under control. It was only with the help of the recently
installed, though small, German colonial military forces that Mwami Musinga could quell
46
Newbury 1988: 11.
47
“The Hutu populations of northern Rwanda are also referred to as Kiga (or Chiga) and are ethnically related to the
Kiga of the Kigezi district of southern Uganda. Unlike their Uganda kinsmen, however, described by Professor Edel
as possessing a ‘basically anarchic structure’, the Kiga of northern Rwanda developed fairly centralized political
structures, in which the key figure was a ‘king’ (muhinza). This process of political centralization seems to have
occurred in response to the forays of invading Tutsi tribes, or in opposition to the existing threat of a Tutsi centralized
system in the south. (Lemarchand 1970: 21). Also see the OAU Panel Report (2000). The Panel concludes:
“Together, the Belgians and the Catholic church were guilty of what some call “ethnogenesis” – the
institutionalization of rigid ethnic identities for political purposes. The proposition that it was legitimate to politicize
and polarize society through ethnic cleavages – to “play the ‘ethnic card’ ” for political advantage, as a later
generation would describe the tactic – became integral to Rwandese public life. Ethnogenesis was by no means
unknown in other African colonies and, destructive as it has been everywhere, no other genocide has occurred. But it
was everywhere a force of great potential consequence and, in Rwanda, it combined with other factors with ultimately
devastating consequences”.
48
Takeuchi, 2000: 22.
49
Prunier, 1995: 19.
50
See Des Forges (1986) on the 1912 rebellion in northern Rwanda.
41
the uprising.
51
But even with these periodic repressions, the Hutu inhabitants of Bushiru
held out against incorporation into the central kingdom until 1926,
52
when Habyarimana’s
father would have been a teenager.
Through Habyarimana’s grandfather’s time, then his father’s, Rwanda was a
kingship, with a centralized court having consolidated control through a vertical system of
chiefs over most of the area that is now demarcated by the borders of the modern Rwandan
state, except for small regions in the northeast, northwest and southwest. During this time
it has been likened to a ‘feudal state’, but what keeps it from being analogous to such a
system is its lack of villages, markets tying together regions, a burgeoning middle class in
the form of merchants, or a sophisticated technological base and system of laws, which are
dependent on a writing system. Rwanda at this time was not a pre-modern state, even
though having a centralized authority, a type of taxation system, and a warrior class that
served as a standing army and national ‘police force’, in the sense of preserving the socio-
political organization. It was not a ‘kingdom’ in the European historical sense, its level of
development more closely resembling a pre-Roman England, but without the wheel,
animal energy used for work, or technological complexity. The first postal bureau didn’t
open in Kigali until 1922, and was connected to Burundi and the Belgian Congo as a single
organization, with its head office in the Congo’s capital of Leopoldville. In fact, Rwanda
didn’t have its own postal administration until 1962, about the same time the first local
telephone networks were installed (in Kigali, Gisenyi, and Butare).
51
Linden op. cit.: 22-23.
52
Chronology throughout this paper is based on many sources, including but not limited to Argent (1994), Botte
(1985), Dorsey (1994), OAU Report (2000), Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to
Rwanda, (1996), and Viret (2010).
42
CHAPTER 5
HABYARIMANA’S GRANDFATHER / FATHER / HABYARIMANA’S EARLY
YEARS
Habyarimana’s Grandfather
Habyarimana’s lineage,
1
on his father’s side, within the clan Abungura
b'abashusha
2
, can be counted back twelve generations. He was descended from the last
king of Bushiru (as was his future wife—even though his wife’s family was wealthier), and
belonged to “a historical line installed in the area in the seventeenth century known as the
‘clearers’, as this area was covered with forests,” and therefore “had the right known as
ubukonde”.
3
On his mother’s side, the line is from the Nyamamkwa, of the Abagesera
clan.
4
Vansina provides a brief insight into the nature of a clan’s organization in the
Rwandan kingdom as it still existed at the time of Habyarimana’s grandfather’s birth, at
the end of the nineteenth century:
Not an unchanging entity that has always existed . . . clans are in fact phenomena
that derive from the political arena. . . . Being alliances rather than descent groups,
clans were mutable and every umuryango [family] leader could always abandon his
1
Kimenyi (n.d.: n. p.), “A lineage is a group of people related by descent from a common ancestry, igisekuru. The
name of the lineage comes from the name of the common ancestor.” Reyntjens (1987: 73) gives the following
account of lineages: “Among the Hutu the lineage constituted an autonomous political unit which possessed a
collective domain and which formed a residential group. The lineage chief, elected by the members, performed
political functions (e.g. controlling the use of land and issuing regulations on matters interesting the members of the
lineage) and judicial functions (settling disputes among members). The immigrating Tutsi, having developed a
politico-administrative system at the macro level, set out to disintegrate the Hutu lineages into smaller units, whose
political and judicial prerogatives were gradually usurped by the Tutsi political structures. In this way, the clanic (or
totemic) organization of the Hutu was displaced by the political organization of the Tutsi.”
2
According to d’Hertefelt (1971: Annexes Tableau 2), “In 1970, the ethnic distribution of the Abungura clan was
5.84% of the total population and overwhelmingly Hutu, while the Abagesera clan comprised 11.04 of the population,
with Hutu enjoying a 2 to 1 majority.” A rough estimate suggests that this distribution is not significantly off the
mark from what it must have been forty years earlier, at the time of Habyarimana’s birth, since movement of domicile
was greatly restricted, and travel was mostly for seasonal work.
3
Bernard Lugan, 2007, African News, November 29. Ubukonde was a patron-client system whereby land was
allocated to a ‘client’, who, in return for its use, had to make payments in labor or goods.
4
Personal information regarding Habyarimana and his family is from interviews and correspondence conducted by
the author, and also from Shimamungu, 2004.
43
clan name and its food taboo to form an affiliation with another one. . . . the
number of lineages composing a clan has constantly varied over time according to
the political adventures of the great families within the region. . . . the lineages that
were believed to have been established in early times and that were met by an
immigrating lineage were all collapsed into a single entity by the latter, whatever
their true origins had been. The immigrants united them all together into a single
‘autochthon clan’. [which they needed] . . . because a ‘godfather’ was required for
all the rituals involving land.”
5
But, as the German interlopers, and then the Belgian protectorate gained control
and influence, they enacted serious changes—such as taking effective control away from
the mwami, getting rid of many of the chiefs, subchiefs, and courtiers (see Organogram 2),
introducing a cash economy, and establishing a solid network of missions, with their
attendant schools—that undermined the efficacy of the clan, so that by the time of
Habyarimana’s childhood the clan was no longer a primary factor in individual motivation
for jobs or schooling.
5
Vansina, 2004: 35. On clans, also see Newbury, D., 1980; Nyagahene, 1997; d’Hertefelt, 1971; and Kagame,
1954.
44
Belgian Government
Services of Vice
Governor-General
Ruanda
Resident
Specialized
Services
Territorial
Administrators
Rwandan assistants
Urundi
Chiefs
European
advisors
Council of Chiefs
(Conseil de Chefferies)
Subchiefs
(Sous-Chefs)
Banyarwanda
After Dorsey, 1994, p. 52
Governor-General
Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi
(at Kinshasa)
Vice Governor-General
and
Governor of Ruanda-Urundi
(Resident-General at Usumbura)
Council of Vice
Governor-General
Umwami
District Council
Conseil du Pays
Organogram 1. Belgian’s Government Structure in Colonial Rwanda
45
One example of this change was Habyarimana’s grandfather, Paul Rugwiro (c.
1880-1942), born at the end of Mwami Rwabugiri’s reign (1867-1897). In Rugwiro’s
youth there was no writing system and no schools, so he, like everyone else, even the
mwami, was illiterate.
6
He led a life that typically consisted of helping cultivate, of
feeding or grazing the few cattle his family owned, and of occasionally having time to
play. His ‘education’ was a pragmatic one of learning traditional techniques of agriculture
and animal husbandry, and his family’s subsistence farming produced some surplus that
could be traded for such things as cooking utensils, cloth, and farming tools, such as hoes,
pruning knives, and an axe, while livestock provided manure for the fields. Family
members supplied adequate labor for the fields, so there was no need for hired help. Some
years it was difficult to barter for enough seeds because of drought or cattle disease. Meals
were simple, perhaps only sweet potatoes and beans (no meat), porridge and water. Milk
was not customarily consumed.
7
As the twentieth century dawned, Rugwiro was a young man, the Germans were
attempting a limited governing policy of indirect rule in Ruanda-Burundi, and the first
missionaries had arrived. Rugwiro, a large man (and from whom Habyarimana may have
inherited his stature), was the first in his lineage to step outside the traditional ways of
making a living, by working as a cook for the White Fathers, a Roman Catholic missionary
organization, which in 1914 founded the local parish near Rugwiro’s home. Rugwiro was
6
Linden, 1970: 64. In Carney (p. 91): “Tutsi elites like the Catholic priest and royal biru Alexis Kagame thanked
White Father missionaries for developing the written Kinyarwanda language that facilitated the cultural renaissance
of the 1930s and 1940s, noting that “religious formation is an irreplaceable element in the initiation of Black Africa to
Western civilization.”
7
“Extended households were the basic unit of society in both Ruanda and Urundi and continue as such in the present.
... Within the enclosed yard, nuclear families occupy separate houses and operate as independent units for purposes of
cooking, drawing water, getting firewood, and so on. However, herds are often cared for in common, though
individual ownership is clearly and explicitly defined.” (Albert, 1960: 52).
46
able to engage in work with the missionaries because the mission in his area was situated
far from the central court and its influence. But he still raised goats and sheep, like others
in the area. His house, built from bamboo and thatch, with earth packed between the
bamboo, was about 50 meters below his son’s; this would allow the son to more easily take
care of Rugwiro and his wife, Nyirankera, in old age—particularly important because
Nyirankera’s legs were paralyzed from an accidental fall and she had to be carried from
place to place.
8
Being employed by the priests, and having land, allowed Rugwiro to live a secure
and relatively well-off life, even though intermittently threatened by the vicissitudes of
drought, pests and disease, an outbreak of which killed almost all the cattle in the kingdom
in 1895. Indeed, he would have been among a very few individuals who seized the chance
or were called upon to work with foreigners, as the kingdom had largely been sealed off
from foreign trade or contact throughout its history.
It is not known how Rugwiro obtained his job with the White Fathers, but his
initiative was to greatly benefit his family and pave the way for his son to become a
catechist, which in turn would lead to Habyarimana being raised in close touch with an
educated, Catholic environment. In the most immediate sense, Rugwiro, being a Hutu,
couldn’t have failed to realize the advantages of working for a powerful group independent
of the mwami’s (king) court, especially when it allowed him to avoid paying prestations to
the Tutsi overlords. It is impossible to know whether his adoption of the Catholic faith
was sincere or not, but, concerning his decision to work for the missionaries, rather beside
8
Much of the information in this section about the personal lives of Habyarimana’s grandparents and parents are
from personal communications with Habyarimana’s brother, Bararengana, and from Shimamungu, 2004.
47
the point. What must have been clear to him was the prospect of a better life. And who is
to say there was not an element of adventure beckoning an untraveled and illiterate man to
accompany ‘exotic’, robed men of God among distant hills he would not otherwise have
been able to see. Perhaps this history of daring subsequently emboldened the grandson to
go off to college in a distant town in the Congo.
Walking among the hills, meeting people from different areas (something very rare
in itself, as hill communities were essentially insulated socially, even considering transient
workers travelling to fro from neighboring countries, especially Southern Uganda), and
constantly being in the company of the missionaries, Rugwiro necessarily enlarged his
world and, by extension, that of his son, whereby new, European views, existed alongside
traditional views for the first time—not only in the clan’s history, but in the history of the
kingdom. By the time Habyarimana was born, the missions’ intrusions into the lives of
ordinary Rwandans had already sown the seeds of a social self-awareness among the Hutu
that would have otherwise been long retarded, which delay might have conceivably
resulted in the Tutsi mwamiship transitioning straight through the country’s independence
from Belgium into a Tutsi minority-led government, as happened in its southern neighbor,
Burundi.
9
9
However, Burundi’s social-political structure differed significantly from Rwanda’s in terms of the mwami’s
relation to the chiefs, who, for example, were relatively independent of the machinations of a central court, and thus
operated with considerably greater freedom and power.
48
Habyarimana’s Father
A thriving peasant-farmer Church
10
grew up around the individual mission stations
in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Habyarimana’s father, Jean-Baptiste
Ntibazilikana, born in 1904, embraced the Catholic faith handed down from his father, and
was among the first baptized by the White Fathers missionaries in the region. Religiously
devout, he became a catechist
11
at the Rambura Parish. He had large responsibilities in the
religious activities of the mission and helped the White Fathers spread Christian teachings
throughout the Bushiru region surrounding Gasiza, in the northwest province of Gisenyi,
and was held in high regard by the locals.
12
His duties, for which he would have received
a modest salary, would have included preparing children for the sacraments, conducting
baptisms and confirmations, teaching converts, and giving Sunday prayer service.
13
In
addition he would have traveled often to service outstations among the many surrounding
hills, being away from home for up to a week.
His marriage to Suzanne Nyirazuba, also a Catholic, and a woman from the
Nyamakwa
14
line of the Abagesera clan, linked to a former king of Bushiru, was also of
service in elevating his position among the hill communities. Suzanne, born the same year
10
“The big parishes there [in Ruanda] have as many faithfuls as our most important parishes in Belgium.” (Editorial,
Tornade, Grands Lacs, 1 March 1935), cited in Bhattacharyya, 1967: 50. Also, Bhattacharyya: 51, “Although only
one tenth of the Ruandais were converted in 1935, the figure had risen from less than 50,000 in 1930 to over 150, 000
five years later . . . by 1947, 48 Chiefs were Catholic . . . of the subchiefs, 563 were Catholic . . . by 1951, the
Catholics claimed to have converted 1,012, 294 Christians and had 386,392 catechumists.”
11
A teacher of the principles of Christian religion.
12
Linden op. cit., p. 6.
13
From author’s communication with Linden.
14
Habyarimana’s mother is from the powerful Nyamakwa line of the Abagesera clan. Nyamakwa was the king of
Bushiru (d. 1926). Habyarimana’s mother often visited Nyamakwa’s youngest son, a respected statesman and one of
the last Hutu chiefs to resist the Belgian-sponsored Tutsi dominance in the Bushiru area. His son, Noël Mbonabaryi,
was Habyarimana’s uncle. Noël’s sons were Interahamwe. One of them, Leon, was a close friend of Habyarimana’s
son. Habyarimana’s father-in-law, Gervais Magera, is also from the Abagesera clan. Col. Rwendeye Magera (the
President’s brother-in-law) was a leader of the MRND party. (Shimamungu, 2004: 31); and see Serushago, 1998: 3-5.
49
as Jean-Baptiste, was among the first Rwandans baptized, along with her husband. She,
also, became a catechist, traveling the hills to minister to the women, and is remembered as
being sweet and calm, with a notable tenderness.
Jean-Baptiste and his wife (Jean-Baptiste in a somewhat more authoritarian
manner) taught the children to be disciplined, obedient, and to respect others (especially
those who were older), and to welcome people, even strangers, into their home. In the clan
Abungura, he was regarded with respect for his wisdom, and others turned to him to
resolve differences. Habyarimana’s bother has related that Habyarimana was clearly
influenced by the home environment.
15
Jean-Baptiste and Suzanne went to mass almost every day because they lived close
to the mission. They were on good terms with everyone, although some were probably
jealous of them because of their relations with the priests, which gave them a special status
in the community, as well as some protection. They owned three parcels of land: one on
which their house sat, and was shared with subsistence crops; the two other parcels were
remote from the house, about five kilometers each, and were also used for subsistence
crops for the family, as well as for raising goats or sheep, which provided a stable source
of income and a comfortable life that allowed them to save some money. From that money,
certain school expenses were paid, the Church and state paying for most, but round-trip
travel costs were the families’ responsibility. It is not clear if or how much money he
received for his work as a catechist, but in southern Uganda, just across the border from
Rwanda, the organization of White Fathers paid catechists £50 per annum in 1920, which
15
Habyarimana’s brother quoted from correspondence with author.
50
would have been about 733 Belgian francs per month.
16
Sometime before 1945, Jean-
Baptiste had a fired-brick house with a tile roof built, situated about a kilometer, by the
shortest route, from the Catholic mission. It had three rooms and a salon, which was quite
advanced for its time, in contrast with the local houses, which were made from bamboo
and covered with thatch.
Jean-Baptiste knew how to read and write because of his apprenticeship to the
White Fathers, and was sensitive to the importance of literacy,
17
sending all his children to
mission schools, which provided an opportunity for an education they otherwise would not
have had. Suzanne, also because of her duties as a catechist, had some reading and writing
skills, and shared her husband’s valuation of education, helping to make sure the children
didn’t miss class.
18
Jean-Baptiste and Suzanne were just two of the many hundreds of catechists in
Rwanda by the time of Habyarimana’s birth in 1937, who made it possible for the Roman
Catholic Church to rapidly spread the gospel and increase converts in a fashion that would
otherwise have been impossible to do.
19
J. D. Fage’s description helps us visualize the
16
Herman Van der Wee, 2012: n.p.
17
“Catholic education became increasingly important to maintaining and developing the community. Along with the
catechists, Catholic teachers brought many Africans into the Catholic community, which came to the 1960s
remarkably well prepared for the momentous changes in Africa and in the Roman Catholic Church.” Lettinga, 2011:
n.p.
18
In Carney (p. 59): “Catholic schools educated Hutu throughout the 1910s and 1920s, and the Catholic seminary
remained one of the only avenues for Hutu advancement in colonial Rwanda. Writing in the Belgian magazine Congo
in 1922, Classe rejected the notion of inherent Tutsi intellectual superiority and hinted at the complexity of the Hutu-
Tutsi distinction: I would say that the Tutsi are not, in general, more intelligent than the Hutu…Tutsi refers not to
origin but social condition, a state of fortune…whoever is a chief, or is rich, will often be called Tutsi. Carney, (p.
66, note 129): “Hutu enrollment in the Group Scolaire never rose above 5% until the mid-1950s. Between 1946 and
1954, 389 Tutsi and 16 Hutu enrolled.”
19
The missionaries’ success was widespread in many parts of Africa: “The catechists were responsible for a huge
increase in the numbers of Christians, particularly in Igboland, southern Nigeria, where the Catholic community grew
from 5,000 in 1900 to 74,000 in 1912. All of this happened with a total of 30 Catholic missionaries, only half of them
priests, and most of them unable to speak Igbo.” Lettinga 2011: n.p.. Also see Fage and Oliver 2008: 167-168, “In
the inter-war period much of the secular prestige of the catechists was to pass eventually to the trained schoolteachers,
51
range of catechismal duties that obtained in much of sub-Saharan Africa at the time, and
from among which Jean-Baptiste and Suzanne might have been required to perform:
In the local communities the catechist. . . gaining much of his conscious
motivation from the eager response of a first-generation convert, nevertheless
also assumed many of the functions of the traditional diviner and ritual expert. It
was the catechist who, often with the help of a group of Christian elders, had to
solve problems and reconcile disputes, lead prayers for those in sickness or
troubled by the power of evil, prepare the perplexed for confession, and finally
comfort and baptize the dying. . . The majority of catechists were given little or
no training and lived in their villages, passing on some rudiments of literacy and
imparting to both children and adults a knowledge of the catechism often
painstakingly acquired by rote. In contrast to these were the relatively few
catechists who received formal education.
20
They became the itinerant,
professional supervisors of bush schools or lived at the central station assisting
the missionaries full-time. . . . In their different spheres, both groups of
catechists enjoyed in these early decades considerable prestige [my italics]. In
part this was derived from their successful acquisition—however slight—of
some of the missionaries’ skills, but it also reflected their position in a spiritual
universe which combined both new and traditional elements.
21
The advantage of living close to, as well as being connected with, the Church was that it
placed Habyarimana’s parents in a new world, one quite different in organization and
potential than that offered by traditional farming, or that pertained under the generally
oppressive rule of the central kingdom: local parishes were much more than spiritual hubs,
the Church built health centers, introduced new crops and farming techniques, and began
money-making projects to attract public interest.
Rapid and major political changes and slower economic developments began to
alter the texture of society. While the old feudal system apparently survived intact
through the 1930s, within it new types of relationships grew up with employment
but the development of this distinctive spiritual ministry was to remain one of the most notable aspects of the
Africanisation of the Catholic Church.” Also see Nolan, 1972: 2.
20
“Most African Catholics owed their conversion to black African catechists, persons who were largely untrained
and certainly unordained, but who were deputised to preach the gospel and develop Catholic communities throughout
Africa.” Lettinga, 2011: n.p.
21
Fage and Oliver, op. cit..
52
opportunities afforded by the Church and Belgian administration
22
. Educated Hutu
took to teaching, cash cropping, truck driving and a host of part-time jobs as
carpenters, masons, seasonal plantation labour, or they emigrated for periods to
Uganda.
23
Thus, the Church possessed substantial independent resources which it distributed in much
the same manner as chiefs, obtaining support from the population by providing them with
consumer goods, seeds, health care, and other amenities.
24
Yet, in many instances the old
structure of the patron-client relationship persisted in the social mentality even as
circumstances changed because of the appearance of the missions:
“From early on missionaries were integrated into Rwanda's patron-client system,
with converts attaching themselves to the missions like clients, expecting protection
and assistance from the missionaries, whom they viewed as patrons”. . . . their need
for land, labour and cattle drew the White Fathers into clientship relationships.”
(Linden, p. 61). “The catechumenate, [in 1904] defined increasingly by the Hutu as
allegiance to the Fathers, became a particularly rewarding form of clientship,
bestowing both wealth and protection.(Linden, p. 62). “The Fathers were powerful
men and there was only one relationship in the experience of the Hutu which was
appropriate to dealings with the powerful, that of clientship. To become a
catechumen for the peasants represented, among other things, a formal submission
to the white invaders. . . . The young Church bore the impress of the society around
it .”
25
22
“. . . despite the heavy burden imposed by the colonial powers , they opened for the first time off-farm
opportunities and thus offered the possibility for Bahutu to escape degenerating clientship ties and to shape elements
of group cohesion against Batutsi oppression (Baechler, 1988: 130, citing Newbury 1988: 210).
23
Linden, 1970: 3. For a good sense of the types of jobs and life styles Hutu (and Tutsi) had privy to in the region
around Astrida, south-central Rwanda, see the collected biographies of Codere (1973). Also see Albert (1960: 66),
“In general, the Ruandans seem to appraise what they see of European culture as holding out to them the opportunity
to increase their prestige and power, and they tend to act to make it as much as possible their own. . . . The people of
Ruanda are far more aggressive and demanding in relation to the Belgian administration than those of Urundi.
Ruandans not infrequently write strong letters of complaint or demand to European officials, even going so far as to
write directly to the Belgian king. ... Ruandans are more frequently the authors of statements published in newspapers
in which they press vigorously and aggressively for their own interests or criticize those of whom they disapprove or
with whom they disagree.”
24
As Linden (op. cit.: 223-224, note 9) writes, “Both Hutu and Tutsi chiefs were able to translate their spiritual
authority into a temporal sway over their parishioners. Members of an Abbe's family tended to settle around his
mission or to find employment there, and as Father Superior he was able to build up a network of clients, often
becoming a confidant of the local chief.”
25
Linden, 1977: 61-62.
53
Church education affected society on two significant levels: on the one hand,
working as a feeder for religious vocations and for jobs in the civil service, and on the
other hand inculcating dogma in the peasantry through a minimal literacy intended only to
facilitate the spread of religion. It upheld until the middle 1950s the inegalitarian socio-
political system, allocating the most educated students from among those in its schools (of
which it had a monopoly) to religious and bureaucratic duties and positions, filling the
country with clerics and future civil servants, first in the colonial administration, and then
in the nascent Hutu government of President Kayibanda.
The students’ lack of exposure to a practical curricula
26
or a rich social milieu of
villages and towns lay outside the Church’s purview—its primary purpose was to build
missions as a community endeavor with the mission at the center, from where converts
would fan out into the hills. Outside the Church’s influence there was little pressure to
change: the vast majority of people were minimally subsisting on their meager individual
plots of land, working with no more sophisticated tools than a hoe and machete. But
neither was there much opportunity to change, because the territory was landlocked, the
26
Linden (1977: 243, n 71) “There were only 296 men being given trade and craft training in all Ruanda-Urundi in
1952 . . .” (ibid: 196-197) “. . . before the 1940s, all the available white-collar jobs were in the public sector as clerks,
hospital workers and a few in veterinary medicine and agriculture. Entry to the Brothers of Charity school at Astrida
(Butare) was pegged at fifty per annum. . . Pupils entered the school in 1933 aged thirteen to fifteen for a basic three-
year course in humanities followed by a specialized professional or vocational training. The day began with mass and
a lesson in Christian doctrine. Teaching was in French. The school was . . . almost entirely Tutsi. . . . and when the
first products of Astrida emerged in 1940 a new distinction arose in the Tutsi elite between a Nyanza ‘old guard’ and
the new men, the ‘Astridiens’. These school loyalties were to play an important part in the politics of the 1950s. . .
.The closing of Nyanza marked the end of a major wave of amalgamations and fusions of chieftaincies; there were no
longer enough new sub-chieftaincies to keep up Tutsi interest in the school. . . .no useful purpose would be served by
opening any new trade schools while existing bricklayers, carpenters and masons were unemployed. The essential
characteristic of education between the wars was that it served only the Tutsi . . . . Within this system the Church was
the handmaid of the State . . . . Conditions at Kabgayi were harsh, but no harsher than life on the hills; . . . Swahili
and Kinyarwanda were forbidden, and the pupils were obliged to speak French or Latin to each other. They entered
at the age of eighteen to twenty and followed a three-year course in philosophy, followed by five years of theology,
Then came a trial period as sub-deacons when they spent a year or two in a parish before the diaconate and
ordination. . . . Only deacons were allowed to wear shoes, and all seminarians were cut off from their families for
almost ten years . . . . Each year [only] four or five men emerged as Roman Catholic priests. . .”
54
overwhelming preponderance of hills made large-scale farming impossible, and Rwanda
was surrounded by undeveloped and non-prosperous neighboring territories. This
‘isolated’ condition continued well into Habyarimana’s presidency: the Congo, on its
western side, was criminally exploited for its natural resources, first by the Belgians, then
by President Mobutu; Tanzania, on the eastern border, looked inward under president
Nyerere’s Ujamaa (villagisation) scheme that focused on self-sufficiency; to the south,
Burundi’s Tutsi leadership was hostile to Rwanda’s Hutu government and as undeveloped
as Rwanda; and Uganda, on the northern border, trafficked illegal diamonds, gold, coltan,
and other natural resources from the Congo to Nairobi, via a route that bypassed Rwanda
to the west. The southwestern part of Uganda fronting Rwanda also contained a large
population of refugee Tutsi who had fled the pogroms of the early 1960s, and in that
respect was not an area amenable for the development of trade.
Added to these obstacles to economic development, the Tutsi monarchy had
prohibited foreign traders from entering the country until well into the early part of the
twentieth century.
27
Therefore, because of no easy access to the coast, a tertiary
educational policy centered on Christian religious discipleship, a colonial and Church
structure that kept the Tutsi monarchy in place into the late 1950s, an economic philosophy
that was unable to envision anything other than a subsistence agriculture and the mono-
export of coffee, the country that Kayibanda helped bring into existence in 1962 resembled
nothing of what is meant by a modern state. Under his presidency, the creation of a
constitution, and the emergence of a small national police force, a nascent indigenous
27
The Church supported this ban because most of the traders were Muslim.
55
army, along with the construction of Rwanda’s first university, put the country on a path
toward operating as a sovereign state, but the new country would have foundered and
collapsed without foreign aid, in the form of funds and donated projects (such as roads,
factories, dams and bridges, schools, and hospitals). What Habyarimana inherited in 1974,
his first year in power, was a country closer to a chiefdom than to a modern socio-political
and economic entity.
Habyarimana’s Early Years
Juvénal Habyarimana was born March 8
th
, 1937, in Gasiza, Gisenyi province, in the
far northwest of Rwanda, five kilometers from the border with Uganda, and ten kilometers
from Ruhengeri. His father baptized his new son ‘Habyarimana’ after a Rwandan proverb,
“Habyara Imana
28
, abantu bakarera” (“God gives children, humans but raise them”).
29
Habyarimana grew up in a very pious household, becoming an ardent attendant at Mass
and a member of special classes. The family offered prayers every evening with the
neighbors, either at the neighbors house or theirs, in rotation. Habyarimana was the fourth
child in a large family (Table 1); he had three brothers and four sisters. His brother Mélani
Nzabakikante (d. 1988), born after Habyarimana, became a community policeman, then a
local government counselor. The next youngest brother, Séraphin Bararengana, was
brilliant at medical studies, and became a professor on the faculty of medicine at the
28
Imana means ‘God’, and is used fairly commonly in names. Also of interest: Rwandans do not carry over paternal
or maternal family names (such as Smith, as in the West.), but create a new name for each child. Especially
noteworthy is the use of French for ‘first’ names (in almost every case) after the Church arrived—the first two
presidents a case in point: Grégoire and Juvénal.
29
Shimamungu, 2004: 31.
56
Table 1. Habyarimana’s Grandparents, Parents, and Siblings (as of 2013)
Name
Place, date of
birth
Place, date,
cause of death
Profession
Residence
Paul Rugwiro
(paternal grandfather)
Bushiru
Rambura
farmer, breeder
Rwanda
Nyirankera
(paternal grandmother)
Bushiru
Rambura
farmer
Rwanda
Mvuye
(maternal grandfather)
Bushiru
Mwiyanike
farmer
Rwanda
Mukerwa
(maternal grandmother)
Bushiru
Mwiyanike
farmer
Rwanda
Ntibazirikana, Jean Baptiste
(H’s father)
Rambura, 1904
Kigali,
19 July 1973,
asthma attack
farmer, breeder,
catechist
Rwanda
Suzanne Nyirazuba
(H’s mother)
Mwiyanike, 1904
Kabgayi,
17 Aug. 1967
farmer
Rwanda
Céline Ahobamboneye,
(sister)
Rambura, 1930
Rambura,
27 Feb. 2007
farmer
Rwanda
Nturoziraga, Concessa
a.k.a. Sister Télesphore
(sister)
Rambura, 1932
Living
nun
Rwanda
Barushywanubusa, Joséphine,
a.k.a. Sister Godelieve
(sister)
Rambura, 1934
Living
nun
France
Habyarimana, Juvénal
Rambura, 1937
assassinated
president
Rwanda
Nzabakikante, Melani
(brother)
Rambura, 1940
Ruhengeri,
1988.
national police,
then retired
Rwanda
Bandiho, Euphrasie
(sister)
Rambura, 1942
Jende, 1997
farmer
Rwanda
Bararengana, Séraphin
(brother)
Rambura, 1945
Living
doctor
Gabon
(2012)
Uwayezu, Télesphore
(brother)
Rambura,
1950
Kigali,
3 July 1983,
car accident
merchant
Rwanda
57
National University of Rwanda. The baby of the family, Télésphore Uwayezu, ran a
business with his truck, but was killed in 1983 in a motor accident. Of the sisters, and the
oldest child, Céline Ahobamboneye (d. 2007) became a housewife, living in Uganda with
her second husband. The next-born two sisters, Concessa Nturoziraga and Joséphine
Barushwanubusa, became nuns, known as Sister Télésphore and Sister Godelieve,
respectively. The youngest sister, Euphrasie Bandiho (d. 1997), lived on a farm in the
Bushiru area. It is perhaps a little surprising that none of Habyarimana’s siblings worked
for the government, nor followed him into politics. This lack of immediate family
involvement in affairs of state would seem to contrast oddly with the opinion of those who
believe that Habyarimana’s relatives were deeply involved in running his presidency as
part of a behind-the-scenes group called the Akazu.
Education from Habyarimana’s father’s time, besides training catechists, also had
the purpose of training assistants for local colonial administrators, cash crop production
(coffee and tea) for export, and Train auxiliaries to assist the colonial masters for local
administration, agricultural production of cash crops for export and implementing forced
labor. Did the young Habyarimana witness in his community this usage of peasants by the
Church? And did it have an influence, perhaps unconscious, on his attitude toward
community volunteer labor, umuganda, that he enforced when president? Certainly, the
type of government he formed mirrored, in effect, an authoritarian, hierarchical approach
toward agricultural production.
30
Because the early mission policies utilizing forced labor
30
République Rwandaise (2006, n.p.), “Rwandans were not given the chance to develop skills of leadership,
decision-making and creativity, neither were they given professional and technical training in fields like medicine,
agriculture, engineering and veterinary medicine which would have benefited the country. It was noted that this type
of training was later to entrench a culture of lack of self-confidence, dependence and passive submissiveness among
58
resulted in the first significant migrations to neighboring territories, it is possible that that
state of affairs might have influenced President Habyarimana’s proscription against
citizens’ free movement inside the country—was he afraid of losing to other countries the
labor for producing the export cash crops on which his government so heavily depended?
As a boy, Habyarimana’s home life can be supposed as being much like his brother
Séraphin’s description of his own childhood:
My routine task when I was in primary school was to graze the cattle (goats and
sheep) outside my class hours. During the holidays I would also graze the cattle ,or
accompany my parents for work in the fields. When I was in secondary school,
during the holidays I participated in rural work—cutting trees, splitting them and
transporting the wood home for cooking fires and for heating the house. The work
of catechism was for grown-ups.
31
The family’s diet consisted of “potatoes, sweet potatoes, French beans (imiteja), flageolet
beans and dry beans, young and dry peas, green vegetables boiled with sorghum and dough
of sorghum, dregs of beer of sorghum (ibiteri), young corn (ibigori) and dry corn, colocase
(taro) or gourd (ibihaza), rarely goat's meat (never mutton), very rarely beef, and very
rarely also, green or ripe bananas.”
32
Concerning the Church’s place in their young lives, Habyarimana’s younger
brother adds,
The Catholic religion certainly had an influence on us all. We were in a Christian
environment of prayer, and Christian values such as love, honesty, humility, respect,
defense and the protection of the weak, and the welcoming of strangers. Our parents,
followers of the Catholic faith, lived these values, and so gave us the example to
follow. I remember that, since I was around the age of seven, we offered prayers every
evening with the neighbors, either at their house or ours, in rotation.
Rwandans.” (Also see Lemarchand (1970: 43 especially, 44, 260, 496), on the concept of Hutu low self-esteem.
31
Correspondence with Séraphin Bararengana, Habyarimana’s younger brother.
32
Ibid.
59
By the time Habyarimana was born, the Catholic missionaries had established 338 primary
schools with 22,645 pupils and a working force of 553 teachers.
33
We have some idea of
Habyarimana’s primary school experience through his brother’s recollection of his own
schooling:
I do not know when the first schools in the region were founded. But before 1914,
there was already a project of setting-up a catholic mission in the region. This
project was stopped by World War I and had to start again after the war. The
uniform at our school was shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, khaki color for the boys,
and a blue dress for the girls. There were few Tutsi pupils in the region. In fact,
nationwide, Tutsi who were in the regions of the North of Rwanda (Gisenyi,
Ruhengeri, Byumba) were essentially Tutsi who came from the Center and from
the South of Rwanda to work in the administration of the North as Chiefs, second-
in-commands, assistants, and so forth. Tutsi children were, thus, children of these
professionals and their entourage. In school, their number was small compared with
Hutu students. In my time, the boys pupils were more numerous that the girl
pupils. The parents were not yet made aware of the necessity of sending girls to
school. In primary school, texts were written in Kinyarwanda for the first three